JEFFERSON'S BIBLE PART II

To summarize Part I, there is a tag of “Christian deist” attached to Thomas Jefferson, which, in my opinion, confuses his religious identification. Outwardly, he was doing everything right to describe him as a cultural orthodox (see his “Christian résumé” as quoted from the Wikipedia at the end of Part I), but as for his view of organized religion and his philosophical idea of God, the word “orthodox” loses its meaning, because its only application can be made to cultural religion, whereas all honest personal opinions are individual opinions, and as such cannot be confused with collective practices, as long as they are not mutually incompatible, which with Jefferson is not the case.

In order to support the thesis that Jefferson was a deist, we are often reminded that he uses a lot of what has been labeled as “deistic terminology,” such as referring to God as “Creator,” or as “nature’s God.” There is silliness in this kind of argument, as no religious “orthodox” will ever deny that God is the Creator, or that He is the God of all, including “Nature.” If the term “deist” is applied to any thinking individual who ever addresses the notion of God philosophically, then I have no problem with this identification, except for its failure to specify that this is exactly the case. Mind you, the philosophical idea of God always rises above all religious denominations, and, consequently, above Christianity itself, as it is, by definition, appealing to all religions, rather than promoting this or that specific religious creed. Thus, the idea of Jesus Christ as the Incarnate Son of God is a particular cultural dogma, but by no means a general philosophical idea of God, which Jefferson naturally recognizes and reasserts, without any contradiction to his otherwise essentially “orthodox” cultural adherence. The same applies to the equally dogmatic (I am obviously using the word “dogma” in its most benign technical sense) proposition that Jesus was the promised Messiah. Therefore, I find Avery Cardinal Dulles’s attitude toward Jefferson’s ostensible religious heresy, in the passage quoted in Part I, wisely tolerant and no less understanding of how it is possible to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable positions on the divinity of Jesus, and still in good conscience call Jefferson a Christian, which the good Cardinal does without any reservations.

Whenever I think about this, it is quite possible that Jefferson, being a consummate Christian rationalist did not philosophically believe in the divinity of Jesus (which incidentally does not disqualify him as a “Christian” within the intellectual mainstream of the Western tradition), but he had a high esteem for Jesus’ moral teachings, which he viewed as the “principles of a pure deism, and juster notions of the attributes of God, to reform [prior Jewish] moral doctrines to the standard of reason, justice and philanthropy, and to inculcate the belief of a future state.” He probably could not force himself to believe in any irrational elements of the Christian dogma, as a matter of philosophical principle, such as miracles, particularly since some of the dogmatically accepted miracles have been of suspect authenticity. Yet he welcomed all rational portions of the Christian doctrine, and he made his own condensed version of the Gospels, omitting Jesus’ virgin birth, miracles, divinity, and physical resurrection, primarily leaving only Jesus’ moral philosophy, of which he consistently approved. This was the compilation published after his death, which became famously known as the Jefferson Bible. “It is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw.”

I have already expressed on a number of occasions my own philosophical preference for a healthy mix of rationality and irrationality in one’s thinking, considering them complementary to each other, and therefore deficient in mutual isolation. However, I do appreciate certain advantages of their separation, allowing the thinker to pursue either path exhaustively, which may not be as easy to do without the radical simplification of either…or.

But aside from these advantages, Jefferson’s religious rationalism has another great merit.

It can be justly said that the Jefferson Bible has thus definitely succeeded in bringing Jesus’ teachings to the non-Christians of all creeds, scoring a much bigger point for Christian morality than any proselytizer could ever do by selling the whole culturally-foreign package to a culturally-prejudiced audience, thus tainting its universally appealing ethical content. Had the Jefferson Bible become the Christian message to the world, it would have delivered many more fishes into Saint Peter’s net than the current statistics reveal…

It is now useful to revisit Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, in its opening references to God, to see that there is nothing heretical there:

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…”

The Declaration is first and foremost an outstanding document of political philosophy, which appeals to all religious creeds without offending any. Once again, if somebody wishes to call the references to God in this document “deistic,” let him do it, as long as we acknowledge that “deism” here means an ecumenical, non-sectarian appeal to all religious sensibilities, except perhaps to the devout atheists, making the Declaration a truly universal document of lasting historical value.

And lastly, it is a well-known fact that Thomas Jefferson was highly critical of organized religion, finding it unreasonable, unbelievable, and generally detrimental to the development of the human mind. In a letter to William Short, he candidly writes that “the serious enemies are the priests of the different religious sects, to whose spells on the human mind its improvement is ominous.” How does this comply with what I am calling the cultural orthodoxy of a citizen-believer?

It is eminently clear to me that criticism of religious practices, even going to the extremes, does not create an infidel. It is, perhaps, the other way around, that unconditional acceptance of flawed religious practices breeds a particularly ugly form of intellectual hypocrisy, which opens a surefire road to spiritual infidelity, and eventually to perdition. (Incidentally, as I have already remarked elsewhere, another alleged deist and atheist, but otherwise eminently distinguished English expatriate and American Patriot Thomas Paine, in his shocking work Age of Reason, made a similar case for deism as the belief in One God minus the belief in Organized Church, which argument may be dismissed on national-cultural grounds, whenever religion is part of the cultural, social, and national identification of the individual, but it is well sustainable on purely philosophical grounds, and anywhere where a specific religion is not the dominant part of national culture. Interestingly, a similar argument is very eloquently made in Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian, although in his case he clearly goes to the extreme in dismissing the necessary religious component of human culture merely on account of its faulty practices and stubborn dogmatic intolerance.)

It is well worth remembering that the great Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard attacked his contemporary Danish State Christian Church in such choice terms as “liars,” “hypocrites,” “destroyers of Christianity,” “a thousand Danish priests… playing in Christianity,” yet his Christian credentials have remained unassailable, despite an incredibly bad blood between him and the Church. Today, it is painfully obvious what he was talking about, considering that Denmark has evolved as one of the least religious nations in the world, but what he said about his Church equally applies to all established Churches enjoying political power at the expense of God.