Osler's Razor

As everyone knows by now, my week has been largely consumed by two trials of Christ, at St. Thomas on Thursday and at Holy Comforter in Richmond last night. The two trials were strikingly different. In Minneapolis, we had a jam-packed courtroom and great performances by several of our students (Phil Steger will now always be Peter in my mind, and Jon Scheib and Sara Sommervold were great advocates). Last night, the trial was broader and allowed for deliberation by the audience, which added an important dimension.

If you are interested, for the Minneapolis trial the audio will be on NPR this week, and the video will be available on the St. Thomas site (I'll pass along details when I get them). For the Richmond trial, the video will be on Youtube, and the CNN story will be available on CNN.com on Good Friday.

Something unexpected happened, of course.

When I cooked up this scheme, I imagined that building a prosecution case would be fairly straightforward and analytical, but this was short-sighted. Because we were doing the penalty phase only, the question essentially was not guilt, but whether the defendant should be executed. That's a different type of argument, one which leads to a darker and more troubling place.

As I built up my argument, I found that the cynicism inherent in my prosecutor-self was at war with my faith. Specifically, like a cancer attacking my flesh, that cynicism ate into the weakest parts of me: The easy assumptions, the haphazard harmonizations, the places where I assume that Jesus must approve what I do, because it is practical. What that cynicism tore apart was any sense that I should be comfortable with my faith and work. Christ came to trouble and challenge us, and he did just that.

For example, part of my argument that Christ should be executed was that he threatens our intellectual life. On the stand, Simon Peter said that perhaps one of the apostles was literate, and that he (the rock on which the church was to be built) was not able to read or write. In fact, he was a fisherman, plucked from a boat by Jesus. At the same time that the apostles were a group of illiterates, Jesus pushed away and rejected those who were learned, time and again. I plead to the jury that this was a threat to our heritage and history-- how could either survive when we embrace the teachings of fishermen over those who have access to our past?

This was only the fourth of my four arguments, but it still struck to my core. I come to Jesus as a scholar too often; he was clear that I am to come as a child.

Of course we don't want to live in a world where Christ's teachings are taken literally, where we give up what we have, where we offer up our other cheek to be struck, and where our intellectual life is devalued.

But can we be Christian without that?