I keep wavering on this book, and I think in the end I’ll
take the optimistic, glass-half-full attitude and consider Emmanuel Carrere to
be a “second friend.” I take this term from how CS Lewis described Owen
Barfield:
“But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you
about everything. … He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing
out of every one. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it. How
can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right?”
I’ve always found too much to agree in with Barfield to
argue with him this much. Barfield introduced me to Coleridge, and that is
worth all of Barfield’s flaws in itself. But Carrere fits the bill. Carrere is
fascinating and frustrating, and his greatest assets are his compelling style
and transparency. I think he’s transparent enough that you can see where he’s
fooling himself. I know them’s fightin’ words but the whole book is a fight –
Carrere struggling with an angel – and I disagree with many of Carrere’s conclusions.
Because he includes his “methods section” and “background information” (to use
the terms from scientific literature), I think I can even trace our
disagreements back to how and why.
First, a note about genre. The Kingdom’s Amazon blurb
represents it as a work of fiction but that’s not right. At least the first
third is memoir, as Carrere recounts his life as a writer of books and
screenplays who once had a three-year Catholic revival phase. Now, decades
later, Carrere looks back on the man he used to be and tells us his historical theories
about how the New Testament was written. Much of the book focuses on the life
of Luke as a writer of his own gospel, Acts, and (in Carrere’s theory) the
Epistle of James (because of course he has to have His Own New Theory about
biblical authorship). This leads to some valuable insights, even inspiring ones,
as Carrere projects the process of his life’s work onto the historical person
of a 1st-century lower-middle-class physician.
But Carrere projects his own doubts onto Luke as well,
and he clearly goes too far in putting himself at the center of this story. He
even suggests at one point that Luke put his notes from his “religious phase”
into a trunk and tries to forget about them, exactly like Carrere did with his own
three years of religious notes. At this point, we’re not talking about Luke
anymore.
Carrere has a strong voice that carries the reader along.
He’s nothing if not confident. He assumes he knows what words mean and what
people are like and walks the line between funny and glib, between self-mocking
and sneering. Too often, he confidently assumes the worst and imports a modern
view that comports suspiciously close to that of Imperial Rome, confirming my
own suspicions that Roman empires and modern empires alike both have a
visceral, unconscious antipathy to the gospel message that they cannot see
themselves.
Like Lewis’s Second Friend, Carrere gets a lot of things
right, and I found a few historical nuggets I didn’t know before. Carrere gets
how Christian worship and Eucharist are ordinary things filled with glory and
grace that run counter to default human behavior. But he can’t seem to extend
this insight to ordinary events, like those in the life of a writer putting pen
to paper.
A long passage struggling with Paul’s injunction to “Pray
without ceasing” ultimately ends in a shrug, because Carrere insists on his own
definition of prayer rather than realizing glory of God can fill ordinary space
and time without me even being aware of it. My awareness is not the point of
prayer, so I can even pray without being aware of it. God’s faithfulness is
what matters, not human attention or thoughts, even with something as intimate
and human as talking to God.
Carrere’s self-centered narrative ends up in some odd
places. In Carrere’s telling, Paul becomes a masochist because he never
mentions his Roman citizenship till after he’s been scourged (never mind that
the Sermon on the Mount points directly to this type of behavior). Phrases like
Jesus referring to himself as the “Son of Man” get stripped of their deep
allusions to Jewish scriptures as Carrere insists that the phrase means “simply
man” (um, not in Daniel 12 it doesn’t). Likewise, Paul’s constant Jewish
allusions are downplayed – because they aren’t important to Carrere, he assumes
they weren’t important to the Roman or Galatian church. Carrere follows the
age-old academic argument of putting a wedge between Jesus and Paul, and
between James and Paul, and between Old Testament and New Testament witness, and
even at a late point between Luke and Paul, no matter how central Paul is to
Acts!
I shake my head most at Carrere’s blithe insistence that
early Christians were expecting the world to end like we 21st-century
modernists expect the world to end. This puts a wedge between the early
Christians’ expectations and reality when people in the church start to die. This
was a crisis but not the earth-shaking crisis that Carrere assumes. Like with prayer,
Carrere is overly literal about end of world and adopts an attitude that presents
itself as modern but literally predates atomic theory. When Paul says don’t
marry because the time is short, that’s about receiving what God gives and
being content, not about expecting everything to end – the return of Jesus is a
beginning of a new age, not an obliteration of all material. Obliteration is the
return of a Gnostic Jesus! Several times Carrere indicates that his biggest
influence is Ernest Renan, whose Life of Jesus is 150 years old now, and it
shows in sections like this. Everything old is new again.
By taking a hard line on what the “end of the age” (note:
NOT “the world”) means, Carrere is forced to put a wedge between 1st
and 2nd Thessalonians, proposing that the second contradicts the first,
and predictably he puts a wedge between Galatians and Ephesians, between John
of Patmos and John the Beloved Apostle, etc. etc. The differences are real and
probably do reflect some authorial differences, but maybe not. Just look at 1st
and 2nd Corinthians and note that the style differences between
these (even within these!) are at least as wide between these other letters,
and no one seriously doubts that these were all written by Paul. Personally, I’m
getting bored of the academic wedge strategy, which seems to be more avoidance
mechanism than actual theory.
Two of the best parts of the book are in the Epilogue for
opposite reasons. The first is the final scene in which he truly gets a glimpse
of the Kingdom in all its ordinary glory (I won’t spoil it). The second is much
scarier. Carrere starts to imagine why good Roman emperors would nonetheless harass
and murder Christians. He says it must have seemed like Invasion of the Body
Snatchers in which your friend is not your friend anymore, and implies that
your friend is not even human anyone. He’s right. This is entirely plausible
and a chilling window into how very good people can be led to do very bad
things. Once you alienate your friend for following Christ and convince
yourself they’re not the same person anymore, you don’t have to feel bad for
turning them into a human torch. This is how it happens, and with this wedge
between the human and the Christian, Carrere plays the role of the good Roman
citizen with his confident allegiance to Empire uber alles.
All these wedges end up convincing me that the center
does not hold in Carrere’s world. The Christian community is different views
living together, Jew and Gentile, men and women, all one in Christ. We have a
model of that community in the canon itself. The different views of the authors
of Scripture are jarring and puzzling at times, and yet after all the exertion
and juxtaposition, I’m convinced that the differences are not the most
important thing: Christ is.
John, Paul, Mark, and Luke are indeed contrasting voices
but the question is whether they relate in harmony or dissonance. As a reader of
the community of scripture, I can choose to embrace each author, learning to love
and live together, or I can try to place wedges, saying one must be right, and I
have to choose between them. The canon itself shows you can’t do it alone and that
when there’s a conflict you don’t have to chase it down or wedge it out, but you
can stand your ground, contemplate, and turn the other cheek as a reader.
Accepting the different voices of the canon is itself an act of following the
Sermon on the Mount and emptying yourself.
Carrere slices away everyone else and is left with
himself and Renan. Dante’s vision of the embraces of Paradise (after the
isolation of the Inferno and the steep hike of Purgatorio) includes Carrere’s vision
but goes beyond it, showing that the Kingdom is far more expansive, hopeful,
and ultimately compelling.