What Would Jesus Coup?

Last week's insurrection at the US Capitol has brought American ambivalence about political violence to the forefront in all its quivering glory.  This meme is several years old, but that makes it all the more interesting, because it was spread around by liberals and leftists -- many of the same people who are furiously indignant now that the "sacred" space of the Capitol, the People's House, was defiled by dirty rioters.

There has been a lot of disagreement about the meaning of Jesus' cleansing the Temple Court, and I'm not going to resolve the question, because it can't be resolved.  There's something to be learned, however, from the issues it raises.

As with most episodes in Jesus' story, if you've read or heard only one explanation of the cleansing of the Temple Court, you need to know that there are many others, and no one knows which one is correct.  To start with the easiest one, if Jesus didn't exist, he didn't act up in the Temple court either; but that wouldn't explain why his inventors made up this story, so we should examine its implications as story.

The next possibility is to take the story at face value: that the uproar took place as the gospels describe it.  (The gospels disagree hopelessly as to when in Jesus' career it happened, but I'll come back to that later.)  The gospels agree that Jesus was in Jerusalem for Passover, a time of year when the city was packed with pilgrims.  The Roman occupiers were nervous about the possibilities of mob violence, even an uprising, so they stationed plenty of soldiers overlooking the Temple court to watch for signs of trouble.  If, as the gospels say, Jesus blocked access to the area, it would have been hard to miss, and it was exactly the kind of thing the guards were watching for. The gospels don't mention this, only that the Jewish authorities were afraid to arrest Jesus then because of the crowds; but the Romans would have been interested in this troublemaker too.  Would all the crowds in the court have been on Jesus' side when he wouldn't let them get through to worship?  I doubt that too.  How would he have stopped them, by the force of his personality?  The evangelists don't seem to be aware of the difficulty.  Modern scholars are aware of it, and have tried to explain it.

One popular explanation is that the action was an "acted parable," intended to illustrate something or other.  Maybe, but no one told the Roman soldiers that.  I always imagine one of them saying, "Hey, Fred, look at what that guy is doing down there!  Should we move in on him?"  His buddy looks, then replies, "Not to worry, Al, it's obviously an acted parable, with no political significance whatsoever."  Even if it were an acted parable, the Temple was sacred both as a place of worship and as a national symbol; Jesus' action had an inescapable political dimension.  The rhetoric surrounding the Capitol today shows the same thing: it's both sacred to American civil religion, and a secular symbol of American Democracy, which is also sacred.  Anyway, the distinction between religion and politics is anachronistic: it didn't exist in Jesus' day or for hundreds of years afterward.  What you have here is apologetic invention, in which a scholar or preacher gets rid of a troublesome part of the Bible by making something up.

So is another claim, which comes from conservative scholars, surprisingly enough.  It takes the "acted parable" move further, by asserting that the cleansing of the Temple never happened.  It was a parable invented by the evangelists, perhaps to literalize something Jesus said that everybody misunderstood.  This has the advantage that it's impossible to disprove, but it's an odd tactic for scholars who assume the historical reliability of the gospels (except for troublesome parts like this one).

Remember that according to the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), one of the main charges at Jesus' trial was that he had threatened to destroy the Temple.  Maybe "threatened" isn't the right word, because he also promised to raise it miraculously up again, a Temple not made by human hands.  Mark claims that "false witnesses" made the accusation, but even though they'd been suborned by the Jerusalem authorities, their testimony didn't agree.  John says that when Jesus cleansed the Temple, he was challenged as to his right to do it.  "Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up again," Jesus replied (John 2:19).  "But he spoke of the Temple of his body," the evangelist explains.  None of this makes much sense: what did disrupting the Temple court have to do with his resurrection?  

John's version is all the more confusing because his Jesus cleanses the Temple and then waltzes off scot-free, two or three years before his arrest and execution; the other gospels put the event a week before his death, implying that it led to his arrest.  The other three gospels also have various Jewish teachers asking Jesus by what authority he disrupted the Temple, and Jesus asks them a trick question: what was John the Baptist's authority.  They decline to answer for fear of the mob; but why would Jesus refuse to answer them?  It isn't as if he was afraid of them: he was in Jerusalem to be arrested and executed for the sins of the world.

Now, the gospels are not reliable historical sources: they almost certainly weren't written by Jesus' original followers, and there's no way to know if any of these events happened.  My aim here is to investigate why they're so confused. I think their inventions were constrained by the need, first, to establish Jesus as a holy and innocent man who was executed by wicked, illicit authorities; and second, to show him demonstrating his power and authority by stomping on their institutions and teaching.  But Jesus agreed with them that those institutions and teachings were instituted by Yahweh. Much of the authority claimed by the early Christians depended on the validity of the Torah and the Prophets, which they appropriated for themselves at the same time they attacked it.  (The apostle Paul, for example, called the Ten Commandments "the ministry of death" [2 Corinthians 3:7] but also insisted that the Torah was holy and good.)  Similarly, there was no doubt that the Romans had executed Jesus as a criminal, an insurgent against Rome: hence the label "King of the Jews" on his cross.  So Jesus had to be simultaneously innocent and a criminal, which helps to explain the evasive way he responded to Pilate's interrogation.  The evangelists probably had no reliable information about the scene, so they had to wing it.  Jesus, like any hero, could have proven his innocence to Pilate with one hand tied behind his back, but then he wouldn't have been crucified, and he had to be crucified for historical and theological reasons.

Christians maintained this conflict ever after, as they clashed with authority both secular and religious,  though remember again that the distinction didn't exist for over a thousand years into the Christian era: the Emperor of Rome was not just a political leader but a priest serving the Roman Gods, and a god in his own person.  After Rome was Christianized (or Christianity romanized), the emperors continued to have religious roles.  Christians obeyed or disobeyed imperial authority as it suited them, merrily terrorizing "pagans" and their temples, Jews and their synagogues, and each other.  (See Michael Gaddis's There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire [California, 2005].)  While these Christian terrorists were a minority among Christians, the Church regarded them highly and made saints of quite a few of them.  Eventually the Church schismed into Western and Eastern factions, and of course into Catholic and Protestant.  

Which brings me to the January 6 attack on the Capitol.  The insurrectionists rejected some authority (Congress, the electoral process, the courts) while adhering to others (Trump, Trump, and Trump).  They extolled the police until the latter blocked them, so Blue Lives Matter was tossed aside.  Mike Pence had been a good Christian man until he failed to do Trump's bidding, and then they were ready to hang him.  Like Jesus, they flipped from open defiance of the law to insisting they had done nothing wrong or illegal, even as they smashed windows, broke down doors, and clubbed police officers with flagpoles still attached to Old Glory.  The only thing that mattered was that they were servants of the Truth, and therefore innocent no matter what they did.  If only Jesus had had access to smartphone video recordings and social media, so we could know what he thought he was doing!

Remember that the Temple court, and Jerusalem generally, was packed with pilgrim tourists for Passover.  For Jesus to stage a disruption in a crowded space, with nervous soldiers looking on, meant he was ready to put other people's lives in danger from a panicked melee and a violent response to it.  That the evangelists don't mention such an outcome is one reason why some scholars deny that the Cleansing of the Temple happened at all, though it's also possible that it did, and that was what led to Jesus' arrest, and to the arrest of the two men who were crucified with him.  But the people who celebrate Jesus' action in memes like the one above believe that Jesus did do it, and they like it as long as they can fantasize that he would be on their side.

Some of the insurrectionists pointed out that the United States was founded in insurrection, and they had a valid point there.  Much of their moral incoherence echoed that of the Left, and some of them were aware of it.  Aren't riots the language of the unheard?  Is it all right to denounce and even attack the police?  The rioters erected a gallows outside the Capitol.  Leftists had mostly confined themselves to posting memes of guillotines, but they pretended they were in earnest.  And who can forget the journalist Reza Aslan's bold declaration after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg?

That aged well, didn't it?  Aslan was ruthlessly mocked for the tweet as Amy Coney Barrett was quickly confirmed without anything being burned down, and he never responded to the criticism as far as I know, but that tweet is still there.  Sometimes I think of it as an acted parable, though its true interpretation escapes me.

I've been moving toward something like pacifism for some time now, as my dissatisfaction with Left rhetoric about killing fascists has grown. (I also have reservations about the effectiveness of nonviolent action, however.)  If I do ultimately adopt the label, it won't be for religious reasons (obviously, I hope), or for any kind of "higher" principles (there aren't any), but because the burden of argument lies on the person who advocates the use of violence.  Will it achieve its ends, and how do they know that?  Who will direct it?  How do I know that the advocate of violence isn't a police or FBI agent provocateur?  The bar of proof should be high, which advocates of violence hate, and I think that discredits them.  Whether they're on the left or the right, they're the spiritual descendants of Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who incited the burning down of synagogues, preferably with congregants inside, so that there would be no place where Christ was denied. 

How, then, should people of good will resist the forces of Trump?  I admit I don't have a good answer, but the first thing to bear in mind is that But we've got to do something! is not an argument and should simply be dismissed out of hand.  It has corollaries, like Oh, I suppose you think we should just let literal Nazis run wild, then; this also should be dismissed with contempt.  (What pushes me close to despair is that so many people who are nominally on my side are just as irrational, and almost as malignant, as their right-wing counterparts.)  Nor do I believe that the Trumpian hordes can be persuaded by sweet reason, nor can they be "deprogrammed" (a popular proposal on liberal Twitter), nor will Love turn aside their wrath.  I'm not aware of any good ideas about this, certainly no simple ones.

I think we should be aware of what we're up against.  There seems to me good reason to believe that a hard core of people on the Right -- about 25 percent of the adult population -- are intransigent, who will not be persuaded by evidence. I'm hostile to Mitt Romney, but he was absolutely right to say that this hard core will not accept that Trump lost the election fairly, no matter how many audits or recounts are done.  It doesn't look like they are a majority of citizens or voters, so they have no democratic claim on getting their way, but that doesn't faze them.  (What we're seeing isn't new.  I remember that many such people refused to believe that Barack Obama really won in 2008 or 2012, and they demanded that Obama govern as they wanted him to, because Democrats were not allowed to win elections. I also remember some young College Republicans throwing similar tantrums about Bill Clinton in 1996: when I asked one if he really thought the victory should go to the candidate who got the least votes, he said of course not, he was just venting.  I don't think he was telling the truth about that.  But what he surely did mean was that his candidate should win no matter what.)

There's much more to say on this subject, and I'll return to it.  I am sure, though, that posting more guillotine memes will not be effective at all.

Saying No in Ways That Sound Like Yes

Thanks to Alas, a Blog, I found this curious essay at slacktivist.  The writer, Fred Clark, asks a useful question: The Biblical position on women's equality, especially in the churches, is still being debated after centuries, with no resolution in sight; so is the Biblical position on homosexuality.

Given the apparent insolubility of those battles over clobber texts, it’s strange to consider that another similar argument — one far more heated and contentious — has simply vanished entirely. This was a fierce argument over biblical interpretation that split denominations and congregations, shaping and reshaping America’s churches, American culture and, ultimately, America’s Constitution. And then, abruptly, it just ended. It was settled, once and for all, and no credible person living today regards it as even slightly controversial.

I’m talking about slavery...

After summarizing some of the debate on slavery and the Bible from the 1800s, Clark concludes:

The dispute wasn’t resolved by exegesis or by theological argument. It was, rather, as Mark Noll wrote, “left to those consummate theologians, the Reverend Doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant.”

That's cute, but it overlooks a few things. Yes, it took the most horrific war in history up to that time, with 600,000 or so dead and many more wounded and maimed, to bring slavery to an end -- in the United States.  In England, by contrast, slavery was abolished in 1833 by act of Parliament without resort to warfare.  As this timeline from Wikipedia indicates, the US is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to the abolition of slavery.  If Clark were serious about the biblical and theological aspects of slavery, a look at how they were handled in England and other Christian countries would be instructive.  (I notice that the next day, he posted about American exceptionalism, though I haven't bothered to read that one.  But his post on slavery is a textbook case of American exceptionalism: it's all about Us, and outside our borders no one has dealt with this issue at all.  I daresay he knows better -- but in this post he chose not to know better.)

Did the Civil War resolve "what in fact the Bible meant" about slavery?  It did not.  It would be interesting to follow the theological discussion of slavery in the US after 1865, and see just how and why biblical defenses of slavery were abandoned.  Although slavery was formally abolished de jure, it survived de facto in various forms, and white supremacy was defended on Biblical grounds well into the twentieth century.

Still, as far as the US is concerned, the blogger is more or less correct: hardly any American Christian nowadays will defend slavery on biblical grounds. Most Christians try to ignore the biblical evidence, and explain it away if they must confront it.  (The same is true of secular rationalizations of slavery: I've argued before that drapetomania, a purported disease which caused slaves to run away from their masters, does not seems to have been proven bogus so much as abandoned in embarrassment.  Scientific racism, of which drapetomania is an example, endures to this day, however.)

In sum, Clark writes,

That’s a huge, enduring problem for American Christianity. For one thing, it doesn’t offer any potential approach for resolving other theological and interpretive disputes. Opponents of women’s equality will continue to cite 1 Timothy 2:12 as authoritative proof that they are right, while advocates of women’s equality will offer alternative interpretations, but neither side will have the option of settling the matter definitively by burning Atlanta.

But the larger problem is this: We have concluded that some of our foremost and most influential theologians, pastors, and biblical scholars were utterly wrong about a monumentally important matter of biblical truth. Yet, because we choose not to explore why or how they were wrong, we are unable to learn from their grievous mistake. We have no way of knowing whether or not we are, in fact, repeating their mistake. We have no way of avoiding such a repetition.

Now, this confuses me.  Even if we could burn Atlanta, would it really 'settle the matter' of women or homosexuals in the church?  I don't think it would, and I don't believe that Fred Clark believes so either.  As he acknowledges, the question of slavery wasn't really settled but abandoned by American Christians; I don't think that's really the outcome he wants for other issues.

I'm especially confused by the claim that "we have concluded that some of our foremost and most influential theologians, pastors, and biblical scholars were utterly wrong about a monumentally important matter of biblical truth."  I can't tell for sure, but I guess he means that virtually all twenty-first century Christians now believe that slavery is wrong, and I guess he believes that he regards the contrary view as held by "some of our foremost theologians, pastors, and biblical scholars" is a "mistake."  Or maybe the mistake lay in letting the Civil War settle the issue of slavery: American religious thinkers and teachers abandoned their obligation to determine "biblical truth" for themselves.  But he seems to have lost the thread of the argument.

There are two separate questions here. The one on the table, so to speak, is whether slavery is wrong according to the Bible.  There is no reason to think so, as Clark more or less admits.  The other question is whether slavery is wrong (or right, for that matter), regardless of what the Bible says about it.  I think Clark confuses the issues, and that's why the article as a whole makes little sense.

By "clobber passages" Clark means the parts of the Bible that treat slavery as morally unproblematic, an institution to be regulated but not abolished, and indeed a model for the relationship between the believer and Christ.  He also means the parts of the Bible that assume or explicitly endorse male supremacy, the subordination of women.  But these are not isolated passages which can be used to "clobber" critics who reject these practices and principles: they permeate the Bible from beginning to end.  (The passages relating to male homosexuality, by contrast, are relatively isolated, but there is really no Biblical material that counters them.)  This is relatively uncontroversial; no honest scholar would deny that the Bible treats slavery and male supremacy as unproblematic, and I've noticed that numerous gay Christian apologists admit that the Bible treats male homosexuality as a serious sin even as they try to explain away the problem ("clobber") passages.

The question, then, is not 'what the Bible says' about these issues -- that's clear enough -- but what to do about aspects of the Bible that modern Christians can no longer accept as authoritative.  There are many of them, not limited to these three issues, and not all Christians today reject them.  But Clark seems to think that if we could just really understand what the Bible says, we could resolve these theological and interpretive disputes.  I think the English scholar and theologian Dennis E. Nineham identified this problem in The Use and Abuse of the Bible (Harper & Row, 1976, p. 205):

If I may quote Leonard Hodgson again, it must be on the understanding that quoted out of context he may seem to be saying more than he intended to; or should I say that he spoke more wisely than he knew?  'For too long,' he writes, 'study of the biblical writers (and, for the matter of that, of patristics, scholastics, reformers and the rest) has been based on the assumption that someone, somewhere, at some time in the past, really knew the truth, that what we have to do is find out what he thought and get back to it.'  It may be significant that this statement occurs in Hodgson's last book; for years he had been moving towards it.  My only doubt is whether even in the end he applied it with quite sufficient rigour either to Jesus or to the architects of trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy.

What Nineham is talking about here is the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, which most people confuse with "literalism."  It holds that the Bible, properly understood, is without error, and that if there seems to be something wrong with the Bible, it's really the reader or interpreter who has gone wrong.  Very non-literal interpretation is necessary to get rid of the inconvenient material. No issue can be resolved with this approach.  If you start at your end point -- the conclusion you want to reach -- only those who agree about the conclusion will find your interpretation plausible, and your critics will easily show what you got wrong. That accounts for most of the endless debate Clark laments, I think. It also indicates why that debate won't end.

The philosopher Walter Kaufmann also addressed this issue a quarter century before Nineham, in his book The Faith of a Heretic.  (I'm quoting from the 1963 Anchor paperback edition.)  In a print debate with the philosopher Karl Jaspers, the influential Protestant scholar and theologian Rudolf Bultmann asked rhetorically: "He [i.e., Jaspers] is as convinced as I am that a corpse cannot come back to life and rise from his tomb ... What, then, am I to do when as a pastor, preaching or teaching, I must explain texts ... ?  Or when, as a scientific theologian, I must give guidance to pastors with my interpretation?" (quoted by Kaufmann, 95).  Kaufmann commented:

Up to this point, Bultmann had generally referred to "the Easter event," and students had debated just what, according to Bultmann, had happened at the first Easter.  Now Bultmann let the cat out of the bag, not only about one particular belief but about the nature of theology ... 

Bultmann, asked about eternal torture in a conversation, said that on that subject he agreed with Lessing.  He had every right to expect that a younger colleague, no less than a student, would proceed to the nearest library and begin reading through a set of Lessing's works, in search of the crucial passage.  After the first ten volumes, he could safely be expected to give up.  Encouraged by my American training, however, I asked: "And what did Lessing say?"  The great theologian hesitated, then allowed that Lessing had once said somewhere that if even a single soul were in eternal torment he would certainly refuse to go to heaven.  It would seem, then, that Bultmann disbelieves in any form of eternal punishment.  In his huge Theology of the New Testament, hell and eternal damnation are simply ignored.

This refusal to let one's No be a No is one of the central characteristics of theologians no less than of committed Communists.  One does not emphasize one's points of disagreement with tradition or the scriptures; instead one emphasizes points of agreement and sidesteps embarrassing issues by raising questions of exegesis.  As a consequence, the agreement among committed believers is, to a surprisingly large extent, apparent only ...

[An American Protestant theologian like Paul] Tillich, like [Reinhold] Niebuhr, shares few of [Billy] Graham's religious beliefs ... But, like Bultmann, they say No in ways that sound like Yes [95-97].

I think this is a bit unfair to theologians: the behavior Kaufmann describes here is also common among lay believers.  (For that matter, Jesus often said Yes in ways that sounded like No, and vice versa. Consider "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," which cannily dodges taking a stand on the very live issue of Roman taxation in first-century Judea and Galilee.) Theologians, because of their specialist knowledge, probably feel the conflict between apologetics and scholarship more acutely -- though that doesn't stop them from trying to evade it.  One of the first commenters on Clark's post wrote sarcastically:

Gosh, if only there were an all good, all powerful being who loved us deeply that could manifest itself and bring clarity to these sorts of issues. That would certainly help end a lot of arguments.

To which another commenter replied, apparently in all seriousness:

If only he had. But, he didn't clarify. He, in fact, made the law into a square circle that institutionized racism, sexism, and slavery and also commanded love and the golden rule. At no point does the bible even theoretically acknowledge a conflict. So, for biblical literalists, or at least those who believe God made the old law based on perfect morality, you're stuck trying to square that circle of being both loving and oppressive.
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If Jesus existed, was God made manifest, and was morally perfect, and wanted this clear, he had ample opportunity to clarify the evils of slavery, of making women into a second class of person, etc. At ,east according to the bible, he did not make use of that opportunity.
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So, yeah, it would have been nice, for Christianity, had Jesus clarified the matters.

From there the discussion turned largely into a debate about the historical reliability of the gospels, but that's not really important here.  I'm more interested in the fact that these people clearly want to see Jesus and the Bible as authoritative guides to morality, and they expect God's morality to agree with theirs, but it doesn't seem to occur to the second commenter that Jesus might not have bothered to "clarify" matters like slavery, not only because he agreed with the status quo of his time and place, but because he didn't see these issues as important matters of biblical truth.  And if you're a Christian, Jesus' opinion presumably counts for more than yours.

According to the gospels, Jesus believed that the Kingdom of God was "at hand," that is, it was going to be established on earth ("as it is in heaven") within the lifetimes of most of his followers.  (The rest of the New Testament is built on this assumption.  I'm not as informed on the "gnostic" scriptures as I am on the canonical ones, but they don't seem any more concerned with social justice, as opposed to individual spiritual purity, than the New Testament is.)  What mattered was not working for social justice but making oneself ready for the coming judgment, which would not be based on whether one owned slaves or allowed women to preach, but on other criteria that aren't spelled out coherently in the New Testament.  This doctrine is summed up in a well-known problem passage, "The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me" (Mark 14:7 and parallels).

These issues can't be resolved for modern Christians by biblical interpretation.  The Bible (leaving aside the absurdity of referring to the Bible as it were a person with a single point of view, but that's the convention) has no objection to slavery, the subjugation of women, the devaluation of homosexuality, and so on.  That doesn't mean modern Christians must agree with all of the Bible; no Christians ever have.  The problem, once again, is not "literalism" but inerrancy.  Liberal, even radical Christians still can't seem to shake the assumption that the Bible, properly understood, has all the answers.  This leaves them closer in principle to fundamentalists than either faction wants to think.  Some Christian thinkers, like Nineham, James Barr and others, tried to move away from inerrancy, but most Christians continue to try to fine-tune it.

My Way, Which Is God's Way

The other day I had one of the more unpleasant cinematic experiences I've had in years: I saw Evan Leong's documentary Linsanity, about Jeremy Lin, the Chinese-American pro basketball player who exploded into fame like a supernova a couple of years ago.  Because Leong began working on the film before Lin became famous (while he was playing for Harvard, if memory serves), I hoped it would be intelligent, serious, thoughtful.  It turned out to be the sort of thing you'd expect to see on ESPN, a hagiography about a young American of humble origins, seeking and finding his dream.  The main difference, I think (I don't watch enough TV to say for sure), was Linsanity's stress on Lin's Christian faith. That wasn't news to me, of course, but it quickly became obnoxious, combining fundamentalism with Culture of Therapy and Sports Cult jargon for a truly toxic mix.  It culminated in a sequence of Lin making a shot on CGI water, which ought to be blasphemous (JL = JC?); it was followed by Lin himself saying that with enough faith he could walk on water.

Leong and Lin both had to grapple with the inconvenient fact that God had made Lin's career pretty rocky.  When he broke his ankle before his senior year of high school, which stopped his team's progress toward the state championship, he explained the injury as divine chastisement for his pride and ego.  Couldn't it have been a stumbling-block put in his way by Satan to frustrate God's plan and keep Jeremy from his messianic destiny?  In any case Lin remained sure that God was watching his every move, and had a plan for him, but it didn't necessarily involve a successful career in basketball, however much Lin tried to convince himself it did.   At one point he said that he wanted to play basketball "my way -- which is God's way."  Funny how often believers tend to equate the two.  "God's way" apparently turns out to be a return to obscurity, as the New York Knicks gave him up to the Houston Rockets, where his performance was less than stellar.

After Lin began his hot streak, Satan (or God) threw another stumbling block in his path, when his opponent Kobe Bryant of the Lakers was asked by reporters what he thought of Lin.  Bryant replied that he had no idea who Lin was.  So the game was framed as a one-on-one between the two titans, and after the Knicks' victory, a reporter asked Lin what he had to say to Bryant.  Lin tells Leong that he'd thought about what he would say, and considered something like "Has he heard of me now?" but then asked himself what Jesus would do, and decided to go with something milder.  ("You'll have to ask him," or words to that effect.)  This made me giggle.  Jesus, according to the gospels, loved snarky comebacks to his opponents when he didn't merely threaten them with hellfire.  "Has he heard of me now?" sounds quite Christlike to me.  One of my favorite examples is Luke 13:31-33: 

³¹ At that very hour some Pharisees came, and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” ³² And he said to them, “Go and tell that fox, ‘Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I finish my course. ³³ Nevertheless I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following; for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem.’"

If Lin were really serious about his faith, he'd ask himself whether Jesus would play professional basketball; I think it's a safe bet he wouldn't.

And hey -- isn't Kobe Bryant a Christian too?  Turns out he's Catholic.  I imagine most professional athletes in the US are at least nominally Christian, even if they don't all flaunt their religiosity as publicly as Tim Tebow.  And that's why I find the story of Lin's faith so obnoxious: in order for him to achieve his dream, someone else has to fail, to lose, to be defeated.  Lin's god takes sides in the vast corporate multibillion dollar world of professional sport, and that's not a god I'd want to encourage.  Nor do I think much of those who worship such a god.

The university cinema was almost full that day, mostly with Asian and Asian-American students and families.  That saddened me.  Sure, in one narrow sense it's good that Lin broke through to professional basketball.  Every stereotype should be broken, and watching the movie boggled my mind all over again at the racism of American sport, which found it surprising that a Chinese-American kid could play basketball at the highest level.  (To say nothing of Chinese in general.  It occurred to me as I watched Linsanity that Yao Ming had already broken that stereotype, and to my surprise, Leong actually interviewed Yao for the film.)  If I'd thought about it before, I'd have guessed that Asian Americans had better things to do with their time and energy, but it never would have occurred to me that they couldn't play well if they worked at it.  But Lin's rise to notoriety shocked the sports world, and typically, many Asians celebrated Lin's success as their own.