Elaine Pagels - Why Religion? - 2019 Interfaith Academic Conference

good evening everyone I'm curious how many of you are here this afternoon great wonderful session we had a wonderful session I'm so happy to have so many of you back this evening if you're looking at your program I am NOT the new president of Grand Valley State University but I'm here to introduce her all of us at the University are just thrilled to have dr. Ellen being a Mantella as our new president she's been here since July 1 and already has made major impact on our campus and it's full of energy and full of ideas and we're so excited that she is with us tonight and that she's also very supportive of the interfaith work that we do at the kauffman their faith institute so it's my privilege then to invite president [Applause] thank you very much everybody it's my pleasure and privilege to serve as the fifth president of Grand Valley State University and if I behave myself between now and November 15th I will be installed as such so it's also my privilege to recognize Don and Nancy lubbers who I know you all know were the builders I think of him as the builders of this university and a part of that is the origin of the Kaufman interfaith Institute so Don and Nancy would you please stand up come on thank you thank you for all you've done you know it's I'm so impressed with this community and there are so many gems that you find and the Kaufman interfaith Institute was one that I was introduced to very early on before I started the job in July at the enrichment dinner when the Kaufman's really told their story of their passion their life's work their family and the Institute so I want to thank you for that because like many things in West Michigan it was it was very moving to me your passion for this institution and the work that you're doing I'm so impressed with the university community with Silvia Kaufmann and her late husband dick Kaufman for establishing the Institute grand Valley's honored them both and will continue to recognize their leadership in the interfaith work Sylvia's interest and commitment to interfaith dialogue and interfaith understanding became more public when she began the Jewish Christian dialogue in Muskegon in 1988 as a part of the centennial celebration of the Jewish community in that city the dialogue has been held every three years since then and is expanded to a Jewish Christian Muslim dialogue when it moved to Grand Rapids and became a part of Grand Valley State University in 2006 in 2007 led her to contacting colleges and seminary seminaries in the area to establish the West Michigan academic consortium which now includes eight higher education institution today's conference featuring dr. Elaine Pagels joy of sitting next to at dinner and learning a little bit about you're really going to enjoy the conversation tonight is the 13th in the series so Silvia you're a leader and your initiative and interfaith understanding has blessed this University our whole West Michigan community it's my pleasure to invite you to the stage to introduce today's program thank you [Applause] Thank You president Mantella and thank you for her husband Bob being with us this evening and I'd like to welcome back all of you who were here this afternoon and the new people that have just come tonight you missed a great afternoon if you weren't here but you're in for another wonderful evening there are several distinguished guests whom I'd like to recognize dr. Jesse Bernal vice president of equity and inclusion at Grand Valley president Mantella always already recognized Don lubbers president emeritus and Nancy have been very supportive of the Kauffman Institute since before its inception from Aquinas College dr. Robert Gilmore associate director of mission ministry and special advisor to the president from Calvin University dr. Elizabeth Wanderlei academic team and we also have with us the executive director of the Society of fellows of the Aspen Institute Warwick Sabin and Elaine Pagels our speaker is a trustee on the board of the Aspen Institute one thing I don't think I mentioned this afternoon is it that the consortium the eight schools that participate in the consortium we plan our events collaboratively we choose the speaker collaboratively and then we rotate host schools so the host cold does not choose the speaker the entire committee does and we've been doing this since 2001 and it's been a great opportunity for these schools not only to provide programs of excellence but to collaborate with one another and they're in a 40 mile radius of each other and before this they'd never collaborate on anything this evenings program will be very special it will be a conversation about professors Pagels new and powerful book why religion a personal story our own Franz Van lira one engage her in a conversation about the book and first I'd like to say a few words about Franz he is a tenured professor at Calvin his field of expertise is the Bible in the Middle Ages he also teaches of course did Calvin seminary and he's taught at Hebrew University and has had fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey France has been an inner little part of our interfaith dialogue program from the beginning in 1991 and his representative Calvin since the inception on our consortium committee I believe the first program we had was at Calvin College and it was with the guest speaker dr. James kugel and the topic was what does the Bible really mean so that was in 2001 when dick and I lived in Minsk Egon we spent some wonderful evenings together with Franz and his wife professor Cate he had two young children at the time it's hard to believe that his older son is now a junior Calvin and his younger one is a sophomore at Princeton he sings in the Bach chorale of Grand Rapids and fortunately gave up his choir practice tonight to be with us and now it's my great honor and privilege to introduce our featured speaker in a dear and greatly admired friend professor Elaine Pagels please look at the program for a few of her many distinguished accomplishments in addition to being the Harwich and spear pain professor of religion at Princeton University she's the recipient of a Arthur fellowship National Book Award for religion and inspiration for the Gnostic Gospels and more I made Elaine in Aspen several years ago and have tried for years to encourage her to be the featured speaker at one of our conferences as I mentioned to those of you who were here this afternoon the summer of eighteen 2018 was a lucky one in this regard I was seated next to her she sat between my husband dick of blessed memories and me at the Aspen Institute annual summer benefit we competed to talk to her he about his doctoral dissertation which he was finalizing and me about our programs in West Michigan finally convinced her that maybe it's something she might want to participate in but couldn't be sure Elain again thank you for your generosity and speaking here it's great of you to do this and she was sick last week she arrived it one o'clock in the 1:30 in the morning at the airport and got to bed at 3:00 and she's been a it's been fabulous all day although I have read some of her earlier books I found this book why religion her personal story very moving and compelling it was a very brave endeavor on her part it moved me especially because we had talked about it when we had dinner together and asked she sent dick and me the introduction in first chapter of the book before it was available for sale I was moved at the time but even more so when I read the entire book after I lost stick in a tragic and unexpected accident similar to that of her husband humains husband Heinz effort in talking to Elaine she said she didn't mean to write a book about grief that was not her purpose although you can tell she's grieving in the book she's moving on and compelled to overcome and to me that has been very personally inspirational Elaine thank you please join us all of you in a warm moist Michigan welcome to Professor Elaine Pagels [Applause] thank you so much I'm honored and moved to be here and looking forward to this conversation thank you thank you thank you very much Thank You Silvia also for the introduction that well it made me blush a little bit and Elaine thank you for being here we've tried a few more times before to to get you but it never really worked out so I'm really glad that you could make it to Grand Rapids for for today and it was a rough time coming here you came in late at night so if I see you nodding off I will just kick your chair a little bit letting you keep you awake we were here asked to to talk about your your newest book which in many ways is kind of an unusual book to write for a scholars yes I read your Gnostic Gospels the origin of Satan and and there are many more that I even haven't read but this was an unusual book to write and it's it's also a book that must have been very difficult to write I imagine as well so what compelled you to write it and and what's the story behind well that's a good question I mean it's it's kind of weird and risky to write a book you know a personal book when you're a scholar I was warned by some acquaintances I won't say a friend but he's president of a small college and he said well if you do that nobody will ever take you seriously as a scholar again so I stand warned and people don't do that but you know it's it's several things first of all why religion is a question people often ask me what why do you do that you know why that I mean that's a weird thing to do and so it's been a programmatic question because I was brought up in a family that was not particularly religious my father had given it all up for Darwin the moment he discovered Darwin and he he said immediately he abandoned the ferocious Presbyterianism of his family in which people were fighting about religion all the time he just dropped it said nobody will bother with religion anymore as soon as they know a little about science forget it so I was brought up to think that religion was you know on its way out it hasn't happened that way and and to my parents horror I got fascinated by it so that's what I do but also because there are personal things I wanted also to talk about things that had happened that I had that had just gone into the background you know I said it was like a black hole in space things that happened that were too difficult to look at when they happen began I didn't have time anyway so but you know as you get older you you can't just leave things like that in the background they come back well you can but you don't live your full life if you do that so that's why I wrote it I wanted to allow those things to emerge and and be able to live with all the experiences I had and even those right so so you said you you grew up in kind of an atheist home and and then one day you went out with a couple of friends and you came back with with Jesus that's tell us about that well it wasn't totally atheist my mother took us sometimes to a Methodist Church I must say it was a very boring one it I mean you know they said nice things but there was nothing that really you know it didn't stick much but but then you know I was living in Palo Alto which you know I thought this is really the most boring town in the world when you're fourteen it really is and so they said well they were going to San Francisco and I thought hey that's great I'll go to San Francisco who cares what they're going for I didn't know it was a Billy Graham crusade I didn't know who he was and there were sixteen thousand people in the sports stadium in San Francisco where I had seen Willie Mays you know hit the ball out of the park and there were 6,000 more in the parking lot and the roads were blocked for miles around San Francisco can you imagine that it's really bizarre and and so then this preacher starts talking and he said things that really startled me he said he was going to say things that would shock the intellectuals and the sort of academic types and it did he said he said woe to America first of all I was brought up to think America was the gold standard of the world's morality and it was and and science is the greatest kind of wisdom right that was obvious the way I grew up he was saying this country is pushing its most brilliant sons and of course the daughters weren't mentioned here into into building bigger nuclear weapons and this wasn't that long after Hiroshima and Nagasaki the killing of a hundred thousand people and I never thought of it that way and he said something about Americans using the Bible to justify slavery and segregation and I'd never thought about that either because it it didn't seem so relevant in Palo Alto which was just you know as white as you could get but it was stunning to me that he was saying things like that and then there was this huge choir singing just as I am and then he said head and you can have a new life you can get born again and I thought wow you know they were 14 I just thought I want a new life and I would start all over and this is going to be a real adventure so and I was very moved so I went down and you know accepted Jesus into my heart and it was great my parents were horrified on the way for you maybe to rebel against well that may have been a factor and so for a year I was involved with a very intensely of angelical Church and there was a lot about that I appreciated it opened up the imagination in a way that only the Wizard of Oz had done before and when I see the Wizard of Oz I really mean it because if if you happen to be of sort of the generation I was a lot of girls particularly read The Wizard of Oz and you know you could be Dorothy you could be out there with the dog and the Tin Man and the the Wicked Witch of the West I mean it was like it was not just a story it was a story that could interpret your life if you wanted some adventure and to get out of a boring place like Kansas in which case I was in Palo Alto it felt about that like that but but I'm sort of joking but I'm not I'm saying it was suddenly a different universe and and a different sense of who you are and breaking through a world that seemed very I would say mano dimensional you know into a like a three-dimensional world in which you could there could be other realities that that I was told didn't exist so it very exciting and I was and I was in love with it sort of like falling in love when year 14 and then I fell out of love with it about a year later what what caused that what's well you starts to question this whoa well I didn't start so much I mean you know I was in that church it was powerful and it was an important experience but then a friend of mine in high school was in an automobile accident and was killed he was 16 years old and I went back to this church in Palo Alto and they said oh that's that's terrible was he born again and I said um no he's Jewish and they said well then he's in hell and I was so shocked I said well wasn't Jesus Jewish Minh to matter and I felt that what had drawn me to that place was not there I thought this is not it I don't belong here and I just walked out feeling utterly desolated and I never went back so that's what happened and and you know that was it what I find quite interesting though is that apparently the Billy Graham that you heard it's kind of a different voice also from from evangelicalism that you hear today right it seems to be a little bit more critical of society other things have stayed the same well I guess it is I haven't listened much to it these days but it was powerful Raymond jr. yeah oh well that one yes I'm sorry I shouldn't say it that way yeah it's different that was that was pretty compelling he was a powerful preacher and it was a powerful message but then I could no longer live in that world so I left and decided to go to New York to become a dancer because I loved modern dance and my friends were all artists and and I thought that would be the best way to live so how did you end up studying religion oh well this is Plan B I I went to the Martha Graham School and took classes you know because her company taught wonderful classes and after a while I realized that I was pretty good but that meant nothing in New York I mean these other dancers were fabulous and they'd started at the age of 8 or something and I had or five so I just thought no this isn't gonna work I don't think that not that way so I thought it what else what else could I do and there was something about that experience with religion I thought what was so powerful about that that happened years ago I mean why was it was it Christianity could it have been Buddhism could it have been Judaism I mean what what was it about religion that made that so compelling and I wanted to find out but I didn't want to get brainwashed so I didn't go to a religious school where I was worried about that I went to a secular University and and the first thing I discovered I wanted to find out what do we really know about Jesus what do we know about the movement how did it start who would join it why how did it become what it became and and you know does it matter to me I don't know so I went I went and the first thing I found out was such a shock my professors had file cabinets full of Gospels that I had never heard of the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip and the gospel of Mary Magdalene and all this stuff that that I'd never heard about and it had just been become available to graduate students and faculty at Harvard and we were allowed to read this stuff it was said you know top secret do not reproduce so so you're interested what what drew you to some of these these well as they are now called the Gnostic Gospels it's it's wasn't pure scholarly it was was it religiously motivated as well well of course it was I mean you know people sometimes say to me well alright you just have an intellectual interest in religion or or do you really care about it and I thought well you know anybody here who who teaches anything it could be what physics it could be French literature or or you know Chinese politics or whatever everybody here who does knows that you have deep reasons for choosing and loving the work you do because there's no other reason to do it you do it because you really love it and I wanted to know this so it was partly religious and it was partly curiosity and sort of what was that all about and then I I just love these texts do you identify with these texts I mean we we just heard a wonderful talk in which you make the the author of the Gospel of Thomas really come alive this afternoon do you do you I think there's still a message there for people that needs to be heard today well there was for me when I read Thomas and these this claims to be as many of you know the secret teachings of Jesus it's just a list of sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth as his secret teaching which the the New Testament says he had but doesn't tell you what it is and I came across saying seventy which says where Jesus says if you bring forth what is within you what you bring forth will save you if you do not bring forth what is within you what you do not bring forth will destroy you I thought hey you don't have to believe that it just happens to be true and so I thought what a remarkable text what is going on here so and it was a huge discovery it was sort of a detective story who wrote this stuff where was it they said it was all heresy it was all rubbish it was thrown away in the second century and good riddance and I really loved some of this stuff so that's why I did it so many people wonder very often and they ask me so this doctor do you think she's Christian or is she you know what what are you do you consider yourself religious a believer that's a very hard question well it's not an easy question because it depends on what you mean I'm more an explorer than a believer I love Christian tradition er I wouldn't bother with it and I find many resonances in it that I really like and some that I really don't and I think it becomes important for me living in this culture which is very much shaped by it for better and for worse to make those discriminations and to know where you're being unconsciously affected by attitudes you didn't know you were being indoctrinated with not by my parents in this case but by the culture one of the things that struck me in your book is also you seem to be extremely sensitive to spiritual dimensions sorry if I just put it out there but I was struck by when you were praying with the monks at Snowmass that you actually physically felt the power of prayer do you think that you this sensitivity may have drawn you to such a contemplative lot as the the Gnostic square well yes and I never you know these were Catholic monks Trappist monks I got to know them through through a secular Jewish colleague it was Robert man he was a violinist brilliant violinist started the Julliard string quartet and I met him in Aspen - and his wife and found out they lived right near us in New York and we became friends and he said he was invited to become their first Jewish monk he liked the monks and he was sort of fascinated by them and so he said well he was going to play music for them up at the monastery and he invited me and my husband to come and hear them play and so I got to know them and was very moved by that Trappist way of life but yes I guess I would say I love Christian tradition I I now go to church which I didn't for a long time quite often sometimes and and and these things matter to me but a believer see I'm I wrote the book beyond belief France because that was written at a time when I realized that I don't know if I believed in anything it was a terrible time of grief and I just thought I don't know what they're talking about you know God I mean what what is that what I don't know what that's about I'm it was very distant in times of mourning I found people who say oh your faith must have been now and I thought no in times like that it was never more distant it just seemed irrelevant or something or just very far away so I don't think of myself as a believer that much and I don't ask that question you know I was giving a talk with West Michigan ask it all the time though I know well I was I was at a talk about about the Gnostic about the Gospel of Thomas once and a young man stood up in the back and said do you believe Jesus is the Son of God and I wasn't quite sure what he was getting at so I said well what what do you mean by that and he looked really confused and I thought it was as though he'd said do you know the secret handshake or are you part of my club or are we on the same wavelength I mean I'm not really killing it I'm just saying he was asking question was important to him and I couldn't say yes or no to it in quite that way I'm morally Explorer we like we like to put people in boxes which is sad but true well I think you see I also really have come to the conviction that belief okay I shouldn't say this here that belief is overrated that when people think about religion they think well do you believe in God do you believe in this do you believe in that now it's really only Christians who do that most most Jews do it now too because many people get shaped by this Christian preoccupation with a bunch of beliefs but actually in you know in if you're Jewish that's usually that's not really the question I would venture to say please contradict me but the question is are you secular are you Orthodox are you reformed are you dissing yeah yeah you know are you Orthodox you know it's it's the degree of involvement it's the degree of commitment it's the degree of practice right do you observe do you go to the holy days or do you not do you do Shabbat or whatever and the same is very true of Muslims often I mean it's not that belief doesn't matter I don't mean that but it's how do you pray five times a day you know have you been to the Hajj I mean Buddhists - I mean do you meditate do you know what is your degree of practice how does this affect everything in your life that's the question much more than do you believe in this or that or that so I think that's why I say when I think about the study of religion which I love to do I think that's not a primary question me in in a way we talked about the well let's call them the Gnostics some people say well there is no such thing as Gnostics there are only a certain type of belief that people have in this period you you emphasized their their contemplative sides and theirs they're seeking for the inner light there's there's also a somewhat more darker belief to some of these Gospels and that is that some of these people who wrote these Gospels were really convinced that Satan was ruling this world and that was probably not going to change anytime soon that this world was governed by the forces of evil and the best thing you can get is kind of get out of there is that dark side of narcissism is that something maybe also that you thank you experienced know that that sounds odd to me because the text that I love I mean the ones I focus on I have nothing to do with Satan that's a New Testament has a lot to do with Satan I realized that later but the the Gospel of Thomas there's nothing about that no there's nothing in the gospel of truth about that there's nothing and the gospel of Mary about that I mean it just isn't there the these are traditions that are about what I felt I was trying to do friends which is having a sense of a spiritual dimension in life okay that's what I didn't have when I grew up I felt I was living in a flat earth because there was no openness to the possibility of a spiritual dimension and when I read poetry certain poetry not all of it but John Donne say or the music certain music like Bach and Handel and and black spirituals that music has another dimension in it you know and that poetry and those the dances of the Hopi so I felt there's a sense of spiritual dimension that for me is very important and it's not defined or captured by a particular set of beliefs is part of your book it's for a great part also about loss and and grief and to be honest you know I I have to now adult children and just the the thought that at any point in my life I would have to lose one of them already can almost bring me to tears so I I cannot start to imagine what you must have gone through and then shortly after that also with with Heinz with your your husband so that's sense of grief what I mean you say people sometimes try to say oh your faith must be so much of a what what did help you through that but how did you get through that well that's so that's a hard question with a lot of difficulty the situation is simply that our son was born with a heart problem and and that was corrected by surgery and we thought it was just fine and then when he was 2 the doctors said they discovered pulmonary hypertension and they said this is invariably fatal and I said well how what are you talking about they they said a few months to a few years he was too and so we live with that reality and we adored him and we didn't have other children so we were just utterly devastated living under that sword you know that was we were told was inevitable because nobody had ever survived pulmonary hypertension so that was very very hard and and the work that I was doing in the study of religion became a kind of yoga it was helpful in a certain way and I was on the bioethics committee of babies Hospital at Columbia Presbyterian which taught me a lot as a medical outsider about what doctors can do and what they can't because the cases we discussed in that committee were all about the things they couldn't do anything about and my son was had one of those situations so that's utterly devastating and I didn't think of I could ever get through it you know so what I and then as you say my husband and suddenly died in a hiking accident a year later in the mountains and by that time we'd adopted two babies because because we knew that if we had never had children we could have lived without children because people do and they engage other things in their lives besides children but once you've had a child and lost a child that's just impossible it would have been for me I went to a very good New York psychiatrist somebody who referred me to at the time and he said well why don't you think of your students as your children I said I'm not that neurotic no that's not it so we adopted two children because we needed children as much as those children in an in a orphanage in Texas needed parents and that was helpful that was helpful actually they sort of helped me through it because I had a three-month-old baby Anna and a year and a half year old at the time my husband was killed and that seemed impossible but because I adored him too we'd been 22 years married and he was magnificent man but I had things to do you know yeah get up everyday find the lost socks check them to see any pause you know go to the dentist the whole thing you know so and I was working full-time to support us so that's part of it but I really wanted to write this as I as Sylvia said so well not about grief everybody here knows about grief but the surprised by this time of thinking you know my life is joyful in in many ways and it's it's a full life well those griefs don't go away somebody said to me well how did you ever get over it I said what makes you think I'm over it you do get through it you can get through it and I do feel that that happened so I wanted to write about the surprise that we can get through things we think we can't get through and I'm sure you you know what I'm talking about the is in a way this you said this is also when you started your book the origin of Satan is there a connection there oh yes well I never had thought about Satan much but there was a there was a minister in Colorado after my husband's death who said well you know you shouldn't be angry at God he said this at the service for my husband and I got really angry at him because I thought these people here they're scientists they don't ever go to church they don't know what you're talking about I don't know what you're talking about angry at God that doesn't make sense to me but I was angry it was shocking and terrible terrible nothing could have been worse it seemed to me so I thought well in the ancient world people would say well Satan does these things Satan his name diabolos means someone who throws something at you an obstacle right in the middle of your you're going somewhere and Wham there you are flat you know and possibly destroyed that's what they would say the devil does that so I thought okay well I'll be angry at the devil that seems innocuous because I don't think there's such a thing as a devil in that way you know Devils kind of a joke well I sort of I don't take evil lightly but the devil himself I don't know I wasn't thinking of that so I started looking at stories about the devil and how when they started realized see I always thought raised nominally Christian that in the Garden of Eden the serpent represented Satan that's what Christians say right a lot of us have heard that but actually in the Hebrew Bible is just a cunning snake and there is no Satan there and Satan doesn't appear in the Hebrew Bible in that way to l5 times they mentioned huset on some some some angel that is seen as the accuser the opposer someone who does testing people job you know so I thought okay I'll look at that and so I began to realize that that figure that is so insignificant a sort of a storytelling device in the book of Job actually when you look at the New Testament the Gospel of Mark the first one written Satan is all over the place in case you didn't notice the first chapter of mark the world is swarming with demons and the Holy Spirit comes on Jesus and drives him into conflict with the Satan it says and then he says the kingdom of God is coming and that's like a direct assault on the on the on Satan on the evil powers ruling the world this is the way the Gospel of Mark tells it in Chapter 1 and so Satan tries to take him down and and then I thought well no when people talked about Satan they weren't just talking people who speak about Satan if they say Satan's trying to take over this country they're not just talking about some supernatural thing up in the air they're talking about people and they know who they're talking about they could give you names and addresses I mean they are talking about a spirit of evil but they're seeing it embodied in certain people so I thought okay how's this gonna work Satan seems to have a social history I mean he seems to matter in terms of human relationships so I called it to myself the social history of Satan so I started to read the New Testament I thought okay how is this gonna work well you know I've read the New Testament before so I figured well the Spirit comes on Jesus at the beginning of Mark and so who's identified with Jesus it's Jesus and the disciples and the enemies of Jesus will be identified with Satan right because the whole story is a battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil so who would that be well who would the enemies of Jesus it would be the Romans who killed Jesus maybe the chief priests who collaborated in the arrest but that's not what I found I started to read mark I couldn't believe it frankly I was so surprised the Satan was never identified with the Romans who crucified Jesus Satan was only identified with Jewish enemies of Jesus Judas and finally with the crowds and finally with with kfs the the chief priest right the the Jewish enemies of Jesus were identified with Satan but never the Romans and historically speaking that makes no sense because the Romans crucified Jesus on charges of sedition against Rome and there were there may Jewish leaders who collaborated in the arrests that's what what we hear the temple police were sent by because Jesus caused some major disturbance in the temple and they had to get rid of this man but why would that happen and what did it mean and what I discovered is that when you go from Mark's Gospel to Matthews to Luke's to John's that identification gets worse and worse when you get to the Gospel of John it says the Jews hate the Jews were trying to kill him it's no longer describes it's no longer just the chief priests or Judas it's not 1 or 2 it's and then in Matthew Matthew has Matthew has a scene in which Pilate is being mr. nice guy and saying there's nothing wrong with this man I find no guilt in him well look he couldn't have been crucified if the Roman governor hadn't given the order nobody had the equipment to crucify people who didn't control the Roman army Jews didn't crucify people if they were going to execute somebody they would stone them to death but this was a Roman operation and it had roman purposes it says right over the cross Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews don't try it you know that's the message it's a meant to terrorize a subject population and that subject population Jesus was popular that's why they didn't arrest him for fear of the crowds Luke says and then in the next phrase Lucas the crowds have flipped it doesn't make sense so I because why does that happen and I began to realize that there were historical reasons for it it's because followers of Jesus were in great danger because if you were a follower of Jesus in the first century you were the follower of a convicted revolutionary against the Roman Empire and that's why Peter was crucified and Paul was beheaded and his brother James was lynched in in Jerusalem and many others were killed by the Romans State over the next 300 years for being involved in seditious activities against Rome that's what happened with the movement so why did the writers of the gospel suggest that the Romans were fine with Jesus the Roman governor wanted to release him that's not a likely story historically at all and I wasn't the first one to say it but I was the first one to see this so Satan was a so anyway so I began to realize that they didn't do it because they hated other Jews they did it as a defensive maneuver to say look we are followers of Jesus of Nazareth and I know you think that he was a seditionist and a revolutionary against Rome but really he wasn't the governor knew it everybody knew it it was a quarrel between Jews it had nothing to do with you Romans so we are not revolutionaries and we are not against Rome please don't kill us it was a defensive maneuver but right and that's where Christos and all came in I was really quite terrified of discovering this I thought what is going on here and but I was invited to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and they asked me to give a lecture and I said well if I could talk about this at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that's going to be interesting David Hartman invited me and I did and then Krister Stendhal invited me to Harvard to talk about it and he pointed out he said it was a defensive maneuver in the first century but in the fourth century when a Roman Emperor became the Emperor became a Christian then it within 50 years the legal codes of Rome he wanted to Christianize the Roman Empire and it became a capital crime to convert someone to Judaism by Roman law by the year 367 or 371 Theodosia encode not with Constantine after that so then you you I didn't believe I had started with folktales and stumbled on what I felt was the origin of Christian anti-semitism or anti Judaism more accurately but what a legacy what a terrible legacy in so anyway that's what I wrote and that that came out of my grief and my anger at Satan which I thought was innocuous and and sort of you know dealing with old folktales and they landed me right back in the real world and so that's why the study of religion is not just about ideas and imagination it's about how we understand the world how we interpret conflict and it's it's really important to understand that and and I think again and again you've shown that stories are very often in that more important and powerful than in fact abstract beliefs and ideas yes because when my agent read the book and my thesis advisor at Harvard refused to publish this because he said there was nothing anti-jewish about Christianity although he had been a German in the Nazi army he refused to publish it but other people immediately did publish it and I realized it was inflammatory but but I felt it was significant and that's when I say I love Christian tradition a lot of it but some of it we need to recognize can be very harmful can be lethal you know other parts of it can damage people in other ways and and it's sort of important to know that because we get influenced by this unconsciously you know and so my agent read the the manuscript and he said he sat up all night he said I never knew why they called me a Christ killer in Boston I didn't kill anybody I didn't know what they're talking about then I knew I had to publish it yeah so in a way that always also brings me to - it's going to be my last question and then we'll have some questions from from the audience but the the field that you study Gnostic Gospels it may seem arcane and but what does it have to do with what we're doing here inter-religious dialogue I think you already started to go in that in that field but do you want to bring it into present well you know it's just that what was discovered with the secret Gospels 51 texts not just the Gospel of Thomas but 50 others are ancient texts a very wide range and what they show is a lot of the context of early Christianity just like the Dead Sea Scrolls showed a lot about Jewish groups that we didn't know we didn't know much about the people of the Dead Sea the Qumran community the Essenes as they're called the holy ones and what they were doing out in the desert but now we're studying a lot about what happened and how much more complicated and that that what there were different Jewish groups with different perspectives as there are now and that there were different Christian groups with different perspectives a much wider historical context so now we understand a lot more about how what we call Orthodox Christianity emerged and from what and who was on the other side and what things they were saying and what things they weren't saying so I think it's wonderful to have this amplify our understanding of these traditions it certainly helps me yeah thank you I want to see if there are questions from the from the audience so getting back to the loss of your child and your husband it seemed like the conversation went from that to a study of Satan that became an interesting intellectual and historical disco yeah but I'm still wondering like personally how you grappled with that you said you didn't relate to the concept of anger at God but how did your religion or spirituality come into play in terms of how you dealt with those losses thank you that you're right it's it's much more than that that was a piece of it but you know you're emotionally devastated I couldn't function at all for a while had to raise the children and move them from New York where my husband was was teaching theoretical physics and now I was teaching at Princeton yeah it's it's it's just let me get I had a thought and it just vanished one of the hardest things about the grief that's involved with any loss people talk about survivor's guilt right but if the loss is your child there's much more than that because your job as a parent is to keep the child alive that's really bottom line right and if you can't do that you feel that you've failed as a parent no matter what the circumstances and so there was mixed with devastating grief a sense of guilt even though my best friend said to me right after it happened she said well obviously you had nothing to do with it or it wouldn't have happened this way and I thought well that's pretty basic but but how do you deal with guilt about that if you can't prevent the loss of the death of it I realized this is part of an intellectual thing conceptual thing but it's in the Bible right the Bible has taught us well take I I read the story of David and Bathsheba and you know the story David desires this woman who's married to his commander and makes sure the man is killed so that he can take the woman he takes her they have us they have a baby and it says and the Lord smote the the infant because of the sin of David and Bathsheba which was their sexual sin and the killing of her husband so what it says is the reason the baby died is the parents fault and Genesis also says we wouldn't die if somebody hadn't done something wrong death is a punishment and that's a very hard burden to add to grief and I had to I had to learn how to let that go and realize that I'd been taught that by my culture and deal with also the anger there was a anthropologist who talked about that and there's just a huge emotional turmoil so I got through it with great difficulty and with help from a lot of friends dealing with the children every day and I could only write this like nearly 30 years after it happened because it was so deeply buried and and then and then the writing was also a helpful practice but I also wanted to say that to parents who had this terrible kind of loss that that that burden of guilt which is so commonly felt is not your problem it's part of the culture but it isn't just an intellectual process by any means you know I participated in spiritual activities the monks at the monastery taught me about meditation which I had to do or I just couldn't have possibly managed at all meditation and contemplative prayer I did a lot of yoga I leaned on my friends and somehow you know it finally gets into a different relationship get into a different relationship with that grief and it's it's not the weight that it was also the other thing is you know I was reading this wonderful book which many of you I'm sure know by Viktor Frankl called man's search for meaning well you know it's an amazing book about a psychiatrist in Auschwitz and he talks about how the people who survive terrible things much more terrible than I had to deal with do so better if they have a sense of meaning and as he said it's not a question of finding meaning you know it's can you imagine how awful it is I mean maybe some of you had this experience someone say oh you must have have such spiritual lessons from your son's death you know and I just want to well never mind because no spiritual lesson to me is worth my son's life I mean it's just a terrible thing to say but but frank'll says what you can do is you can create meaning and I thought about for example Mothers Against Drunk Driving right when when your daughter or son is killed by a drunk driver you don't just grieve you do something to try to prevent those things from happening those parklands students in in florida when their classmates are shot to death in front of them how can any of us imagine how that must have what a horror and yet they go out and they agitate and say we have to stop using semi-automatic rifles for mass killings in this country so they're trying to do something and others who were heroes Saint Mary of Paris inspired me she was an Orthodox Russian Orthodox woman who lived in Paris in the 1940s very deeply devout Christian poet and when Jews were being rounded up in the main square in Paris she went into the square and asked the parents if she could put their children in trash cans to save their lives and she they put some of the children in trash cans the parents were taken away gone and she found families for those children and this is somebody whose six-year-old daughter had died and she said this is she said at the time her daughter died meaning has lost all meaning but then she did that and she did more which I don't need to go into but I wrote about it so she found meaning so what what my husband and I did was feel that we would find children who needed two needed parents the way we needed children and we would give what we couldn't give to our son to those children and that's what we did so that was a matter of finding meaning and at the end of the book it was a moment of saying oh here they are you know hey they're now eighteen and twenty I mean now they're a little older than that but you know when I was writing and there they are and they're alright and they're my family I mean the others aren't here but they are here and that's something to rejoice in thank you in your description of your early days of upbringing there's a quite a contrast I get a picture of your early upbringing was not spiritual and then you became part in gauged in the evangelical and you use the word intensely in evangelical and there is an intensity in your word as a doctor and family medicine for 30 years I know about transitions in young people as they become adolescents and grow in context could you expand on your sense of the intensity in the context of your early days in a non spiritual setting you mean about what that meant well it was it was an invitation to have an independent life and a different understanding of the universe and while my reality and even who I was than what I was brought up with which struck me as incomplete you know and also that idea of born again you can have a new life I mean that's pretty exciting when you're a teenager and but it was also a life with with with a much in a much bigger universe because I was and I was in a universe that that now had a what I thought of as a spiritual dimension yeah which I don't live well without I think some people do but I'm not one of them your husband was sorry was a scientist as well was that did he have some of the same spiritual ideas and views as you did well no when we first went out he was very charming man and I saw him when he was 17 and I thought oh wow striking young man and then you know I knew him for a long time before we got together and got married but he then he was an elementary particle physics he said religion why religion why would you do something that has why did you do something that has impact in the real world and I said well why do you do elementary particles and he was trying to understand something fundamental and so was I and we figured this out after after a while and I left I loved the world of elementary particle physics it's full of the imagination too it's I mean these physicists have all these wonderful metaphors and they live in a world of galaxies and universes and n-dimensional space I mean that's pretty amazing and he was just a marvelous man he had a sense of his own spiritual depth but it wasn't conventionally religious but I loved his work and and he got very excited about what I was doing and we were very much in love with each other so that worked really well this one's a little out there but the poet rel key if you've read some of her work do you have any comment on and her worker thinks she said in your life or your study of religion Oh risk real key is amazing I love his work he writes about angels he writes about he's a he's an amazing poet I don't have anything particular to say but I do love the elegies and thank you for that and you know that's another thing I think of religious language well it's it's like poetry I'm not saying there isn't reality in it I think of it Marianne Moore says that poems a poem is an imaginary gardens with real toads in them and I thought well these some of these stories to me are like Adam and Eve it's like an imaginary garden paradise but with human realities are being discussed there are real things going on we identify with with those stories because they speak to us about fundamental themes in our lives so I think of it somewhat like that back to your husband do you believe that there is any place for quantum physics to bridge that gap between science and religion that's a really interesting question I am NOT up on it these days but I I really I don't know I was just hearing about dark matter in the universe and there's some very interesting speculations about dark matter and black holes and the the physicist Stephen Hawking came and gave us talk in honor of my husband after he died in Aspen it was called and Hawking as a well-known atheist he said but but his his talk was called black holes and their children baby universes and I thought that was kind of lovely the thought of something coming out of a black hole but I do think that physics is a different kind of language you know it doesn't ask the question why Steve Hart a Steve Weinberg at the University of Texas says you know the more we know about the universe the more we know it is pointless and meaningless and my husband used to laugh and say you know Steve physics is not philosophy and it's not theology physics doesn't tell you that the universe is pointless and meaningless at all it just tells you how elementary particles move in space so the they address different questions so I tend to think that the question well Steve Hawking I mean I'm and also Steve Weinberg talked about how the universe began Weinberg wrote a book called the first three minutes but he can't answer the question is there an intelligence behind it or not and Einstein would have said yes I call it the good Lord Einsteins belief there was a kind of intelligence in the in the way the universe was came into being and and Weinberg would say well that's nonsense I don't think physics can get you there myself but I don't know that much about physics now I just think it's a different kind of discourse so that that's why physicists have such different views on it that religion has different questions which is you know is this an intelligible process we're living in or is it a random collision of atoms and simply but but I'm not the person really to ask them about physics I was only a delighted vicarious learner of those things so maybe some of you have other thoughts on that hi I just wanted to say I really enjoyed your book I read it as part of a book club and it was very interesting and I attended your afternoon lecture and something I was thinking about was that I think your scholarship forces us to consider the historical circumstances of Christian faith the human work the decisions the inevitable messiness of human error that kind of went into the creation of our holy books and our traditions and our Creed's and this of course comes up right against the certainty and absolutism of a lot of Christian leaders and I'm wondering if you can say more about that one of my favorite lines in this book was when you talk about an African convert Tertullian who when Christian other Christians challenged him he ordered them to stop asking questions and accept what they're taught famously warning that questions are what make people heretics yes questions make people heretics I love that they do they do and and I don't think that's a bad thing the word heresy in Greek means choice and a heretics are people who've made certain kinds of choices and I think some of the bishops thought yeah it's not a good thing to let people make their own choices we should be telling them what they believe right so I tend to be heretical but I certainly love this tradition as well so that's a paradox but there's no way you can only be a heretic within a certain tradition right well that's right you need a tradition to be a heretic that's exactly right I mean and you see what what we now see is that Christianity isn't something like an amoeba that grew into a dinosaur just you know with with all the the you know the genetic information that now makes up a dinosaur it's it it's a series as you say a very complicated arguments discussions reflections for two thousand years people have been discarding certain parts of it and interpreting others differently and that's why we have Pentecostal isten Christian Scientists and Baptists and Catholics and all the other different groups Quakers because people emphasize different things and and I think that's part of the richness of this tradition well I think eventually we tend to think of religions sometimes as abstract things but you can't think of religion apart from the people who believe it as well yes absolutely it certainly is and it's a story of of how we deal with fundamental questions in our lives I would I listen to you this afternoon and really quickly I could feel my body light up with listening to you and this question I can't formulate quite right but I I was aware that that lightness came from hearing a woman in academia which is not very common to hear such a masculine framing of the world of religion to have such a powerful voice from a woman and I I'm curious how you may see yourself in your when you look back at your work and in your career what were some touch stones for you that you saw I am a different person in this world of this academic world and theology in particular and that's important this part about me is different and it's important I just curious that's an interesting question probably would take more thought I was certainly told I was different when I applied to graduate school and I was told they would have admitted me if I were a man but they'd had very bad luck with women because they always quit later I realized they encouraged women to quit because they thought we couldn't make it that was the first thing and there were very few women in graduate school then but also I'm not sure how to answer that I'm just really glad these days to see so much more opportunity for women and so many women who expect of themselves much more than most of us were taught to expect we could do or imagine or try and and do it you know I think that's just wonderful thank you that question you also received quite a bit your work has received quite a bit of backlash when you came out with the Gnostic Gospels as well right it was there may be also a sexist undertone at that oh well I mentioned my mentor at Oxford Henry Chadwick in his review commenting in The Times Literary Supplement saying you know women are very susceptible to heresy yeah right st. Paul said that actually he didn't but deutero poll said that in first Timothy and second Timothy that women are easily led astray you know and they're weaker than men and they don't have the same kind of intellect so you have to understand that they're often gullible unfortunately I lost a son at 16 see in growing up Jewish and reformed in Grand Rapids was interesting to me and it kind of a shock to me when I heard you make the comment about what was said to you about that well your friend had gone to hell for being Jewish you know not a shock to me and saying that but it just brings up Wells up to me and and it was always the comment that still struck me not your comment but when they passed away and people would say to me things like well God had a reason for that you know the I'm sure I'm sure there's a reason and to me it was always the the challenge knock-back as to what the reason was but I knew what I had with Nathan and how fortunate we were to have Nate and and we're blessed every day with need and it's just I just want to know how do you explain as it is there is a rationales when people come up to you and say I don't know what to say like I'm sorry I'm feeling for you I'm thinking of you and it's just the idea of that when God is introduced into a moment like that it's kind of a shock to what you said wasn't a shock to me emotionally it just awoken that feeling yes I think that is so painful people feel they have to say something nice and I remember the the person who came from the police department to tell me that my husband had fallen to his death when I had two small children I was preparing dinner for us that night and he said god never gives us more than we can handle and I thought how do you know what I can handle how do you know that our son died a year ago I was just livid and I couldn't speak but I was standing by the door of the deck and I ripped it off its handles and I don't know how I did it it provides a strength inside personally to prove otherwise that that whatever reason there was continues on I did it didn't end at that time more life began in in lieu of Nate yeah I don't I don't know if this everything happens for a reason works for me I you know my son had a disease that is on very very rare pulmonary hypertension nobody knows why people have it it just happens once in a while I don't think that too I do imagine that God would do such a thing it's kind of obscene it seems to me I just can't get it well thank you hi it's me again um question for you just like quantum mechanics has challenged physical challenge classical physics and the more we note we know a lot more today one hundred fifty percent or fifty years ago about the historical Jesus it was less than a hundred years ago that we thought the Milky Way was the whole universe do you see with some of these writings are coming about that Christianity will have to change over time or transform or start accepting more of these new insights because part apart of the part of the transformation process of Christianity is about metamorph and changing and chardon talked a lot about this do you feel that organized religion specific Christianity will need to adopt some more of these influences and maybe accept some of these other contempo of teachings and stuff like that it's a good question I mean I'm sure there are people who will never do that but you know as you suggest these traditions survive by being lived and reinterpreted in different generations and they do change attitudes about about the universe about the creation of the universe about attitudes about sexuality attitudes about people of other races and people of other ethnicities and people of other religions I mean these questions are so fundamental and you know you know we live in very different circumstances than people did 2,000 years ago you know if we thought of it the same way they did - well but see there's a pretense in Christianity that if you're say a Lutheran that Martin Luther taught exactly what Jesus meant justification by faith that was it if you're a Catholic you know Catholic Church teaches exactly what Jesus meant if you're Calvinists or Quaker if you're Christian Science Jesus was a healer and that's what it really was about so I mean these are different interpretations and I don't find fault with them actually I think there are different ways we interpret our lives and I think these traditions do change they have and they are changing as you know in fact I think we can see them change right now in this very room as well I think we are part of that change yeah and yet and yet you know the tradition is really quite powerful and Jewish tradition is the same way it's there are enormous changes from the time that the Hebrew Bibles were written or the 3,000 years ago some of these traditions written down and probably you know told for a long time before that so I'm not advocating change I eat sometimes don't like it but but it happens and and I I think you know what you suggest is something that we recognize thank you Elaine you must be exhausted well I'm also exhilarated to be here and really enjoy this conversation so thank you very much I want to make sure that you go to bed early and have a good night's rest as well and I want to thank you so much for coming and for talking with us I would just like to thank Elaine for a long and powerful day it was inspirational educational and you didn't see by the audience that we have tonight many of them who've been here all day long and the questions that they asked you you've really reached us all in a different way in France you did a great job I never had my doubts about you you did a great job and Doug thank you and Kyle Kyle for just doing an outstanding job and in in typical Kaufman Institute style of putting on a fabulous conference and we hope to see you back next fall sometime we don't have a speaker yet but there'll be another consortium conference thank you all for coming I hope you enjoyed the day as much as I did [Applause]

Channel: Kaufman Interfaith Institute

Views: 6,611

Rating: 4.7795277 out of 5

Keywords: Elaine Pagels, Gnostic, Gospel, Religion, Christianity, Judaism, Christian, Jesus, GVSU, Kaufman Interfaith Institute, Calvin University, bible, Scripture, Grief, Loss, Death, Meaning, Healing, West Michigan, Academic, Consortium, Apocrypha, Canon

Id: nROIfIK9csU

Length: 86min 51sec (5211 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 12 2019