michael-dean-k/

A goal of mine has to read the majority of the Bible—New and Old Testaments—by next Easter, which means I need to start soon, next month, September, and carve out 15 hours per month or so. My original plan was too simple. I decided on the The Oxford Annotated 5th edition, but that has limitations. It's academic and “non-confessional,” meaning, it’s not any particular church’s perspective; it’s the best in terms of secular scholarship, and is the standard in Ivy league religious departments. It’s probably great for the historical perspective, but it doesn’t include the other perspectives at all.

I do want to contemplate the allegorical, typological, and moral angles of the Bible too, but my decision is whether I want (1) a single perspective (the Orthodox perspective), (2) no perspective (so I’m forced to derive my own), or (3) a range of perspectives (which I would have to critically triangulate). Each approach would offer something different. I already have Kallistos Ware on my reading list—on theology, on the church, on the Philokalia: focused on Orthodox prayer—but all that doesn't include the Orthodox angle on the Bible.

I'm not necessarily looking for a traditional Orthodox outlook, but rather an Orthodox foundation for a personal and idiosyncratic outlook. I think creative liberty in interpretation is how to best engage with a religious text.

This ties into an idea I have about seeing religion through the three lenses of philosophy: ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. I find myself agreeing with the ethics and metaphysics of Orthodoxy (how to live, and the nature of reality), but disagreeing with the epistemology of religion in general; epistemology is about how we attain knowledge, and most religions are anchored in fixed answers to life’s biggest mysteries. (...Yes, even within a sealed worldview, there is still work to do in building a personal relationship with the material, but this does not include doubting the core dogmas...). My view is that the deepest form of spiritual practice comes from tolerating ambiguity and directly grappling with the mysteries; this involves questioning central axioms, inventing original interpretations, and extending scripture forward.

Here's the latest game plan on how to achieve this—it involves five different Bibles:

• I found three specialized translations (one for the Old Testament, one for the Gospels, another for Acts/Letters/Revelations) that are most faithful to the original linguistic intent. They’re translated by philologists/classicists/philosophers. After reading samples from a bunch, I found these to be the most literary and engaging to read. I’ll read these without commentary, and take notes with my own interpretations.

  • The Hebrew Bible by Robert Alter (2019);
  • The Gospels by Sarah Ruden (2021);
  • The New Testament by David Bentley Hart (2023);

• After reading a book (ie: Genesis), I’ll read the The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Fifth Edition), but only for the historical introduction for that book (ie: Genesis has about 10 pages, where the Orthodox Study Bible only has 2). The Oxford commentary felt a little too unstructured and pedantic, though I imagine for some books, I will dive in.

• Before moving onto the next book, I’ll read the commentary from The Orthodox Study Bible. In addition to line-by-line commentary, it also has short essays which I found great for synthesizing everything. This gives the frame for my church and the specific religious tradition I grew up in.

The value in this process is: (1) I start with the source text, without commentary, meaning I get to record my own idiosyncratic first impressions; but then, really, (2) I compare those impressions with a range of sources that don't agree. This ties to some good general reading advice I recently heard: simultaneously read books on a topic that have diverging conclusions. There's a tension when three different books interpret Genesis differently. Is the snake the devil? By levitating above any singular perspective, but taking all sides seriously, I can build a better understanding of the hyper-object (rather than a fixed perspective).

The syllabus:

• September 26: Genesis + Exodus (720 pages) / 14h
• October 26: Remaining Moses Books (665 pages) / 13h
• November 26: Selections of Prophets (645 pages) / 15h
• December 26: Psalms (580 pages) / 13h
• January 27: Rest of Wisdom Books (495 pages) /12h
• February 27: The Gospels (700 pages) / 17h
• March 27: Acts + Letters + Revelations (110 pages) / 18h

The full-stack of religion: cosmology > scripture > practice > ethics > liturgy. We have a metaphysical impulse to make sense of our reality, and in a moment of “gnosis” someone writes it down, and then builds a series of personal practices around it, which starts to answer the question of how to live, and these ethics are legible to others who then may join in their liturgies through a church. This captures the process from which metaphysical musings conglomerate into an institution.

Note: theology is nested within cosmology, as it’s a common experience to feel the presence of an anthropomorphic Creator, but you can also have models of your reality that are non-theistic.

Where atheists go wrong is that they challenge the cosmology, but then throw out the entire branch (no scripture, no practice, no liturgy), and assume individualist secular ethics don’t require the entire stack. Modern spirituality is possibly worse, because they also throw out the entire religious stack, but the ethics they vaguely aspire to are less rigorous than even an atheist.

Where I stand: that the architecture of religion is extremely important—we need religious institutions—but our existing religion have been faulty in their conception, and have been “captured.” The overall challenge in being a heretic, in a religiously-inspired eccentric lonewolf kind of way, is that it’s very hard to concretize your own musings into liturgy. It is an isolating thing. Unless, I suppose, your system works, to a degree that your ethics are so unique or so marveled at, or, you are just a good marketer of your own scripture, that you can get maybe 100 people to “follow” you, but at that point, what you really have is a small cult, and that’s a dangerous thing too.

And so the solution, I think, is to not actually invent some New Age religion, but to create new sects of existing religions, making them more participatory higher up in the stack. To me, this is about understanding the elements of, say, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and reworking them, recombining them, and then experimenting on the resulting scriptures, practices, and ethics, in an almost scientific way, and you’ll learn the flaws in your original conceptions, and then you have to return to the source and try again, over and over, slowly accumulating your own personal relationship to a larger, shared, historical universe, and of course any orthodox Christian, and probably most Catholics too, are very much against this.

I’m talking about questioning the root level assumptions, as in, maybe Christ did not literally resurrect, and maybe God is not a conscious agent that listens to us, and maybe there is no eternal Heaven, however, maybe Christ is a mythical embodiment of the supreme ethics we should all be living, and so what if there were a sect that very rigorously tries to live as Christ, while acknowledging he does not need to be anything beyond a historical-literary figure?

When someone is squeamish about this, it seems to me there’s a great deal of fear in the resistance, a fear that was dispelled, because a supernatural Christ is the answer to that painful and existential void of what happens after death, and I just wonder if there’s room for a rich, religious life, filled with agapic love and community service, that doesn’t require infinite existence in a Kingdom of souls.

In fact, the indefinite preservation of ego beyond death might be one of the most unChristly things I can conceive. To die for good means real stakes exist. Is not the Christ who permanently dies and still chooses love anyway far more radical? More selfless? Does the resurrection not cheapen the sacrifice? Is the crucifixion without the resurrection not the braver story? (If it turns out that Christ was actually modeled off of Jesua, the righteous leader of the Essene cult that was crucified along with all the men in their group in 83 BC, and they passively accepted it, then that may be the true and ultimate crucifixion.)

Personally I think it’s more romantic to dissolve my architecture of self back into the dirt, knowing I will become fertilizer to feed bugs, and then in 10s of millions of years, all my energy will be reincarnated into the matter that makes some other unknowable being, whether fauna or mammal ... And FWIW, I am by no means anti-supernatural. I am enamored by hallucinations and dreams, and equal part terrified. I think there is an afterlife, a 3-minute DMT-odyssey that feels like 300 years, equal parts heaven and hell, built into human biology (so long as you don’t disintegrate via nuclear annihilation), but I share this I suppose to show I’m not a square Cartesian. Or maybe, in some ways, if you follow rationality far enough, it eventually becomes inconceivable and super-natural. I think there's a big difference between a rationalist who poo-poos anything but known science, and a rationalist who uses reason to plunge into the numinous (ie: Pythagoras, the alchemists, Jung, etc.). Whether “hallucinations” are actually part of a materialist reality or an “antenna” matter less to me than the idea that non-rational states of consciousness are on par, if not more important to waking states …

Again, all this to say, these are the proto-musings of a Heretic. I do believe I’ve told Taylor once that I have a budding and embarrassing dream to start a new sect of Christianity. On reflecting on it more, it's also a dangerous position to take, more of a threat than an atheist or an outsider, for a non-believer is deemed a fool, but one who reinterprets the same source material is a deranged competitor.

I eventually want to make the argument that going to church can easily turn into a stale habit that is separated from the actual act of “building a relationship with God” (however you define that).

I’ve found the practices of writing and meditating to be far more helpful in becoming aware of my insecurities, facing death, giving up control, forgiving, detaching from obsessions, re-aligning, etc. Church done right would require everyone to do these practices, in a group. Currently, I see it as a form of theological broadcasting, where tradition, ritual, and dogma are the core unifiers—but without an element that is vulnerable or ego-shattering, I think it’s limited in its potential effects.

I’m not saying we should not go to church. I’m saying we should redesign church. It’s also possible that these elements, groups, sub-practices exist and I’m just not aware of them, and so it’s on me to find them.