Critiquing Matthew Hartke’s Proposal that Jesus’ Disciples Suffered from Cognitive Dissonance (Part 1–The Summary)

Matthew Hartke is a former Christian who still writes quite a bit about Christianity and Biblical Studies on his blog. He studied Biblical Studies at Regent University in Virginia Beach. The only reason I mention that is because my brother got a master’s degree in Business from Regent University, while I got a master’s degree in New Testament Studies from Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. I occasionally kid my brother that he went to Pat Robertson’s school, while I went to a place where the likes of Gordon Fee, Bruce Waltke, Eugene Peterson, and J.I. Packer taught.

That obviously means that I am a better person….and when I see someone got a Biblical Studies degree from Regent University, I smirk a little. 😉

All kidding aside, I’ve never met Matthew Hartke, but we’ve had a few brief interactions on Twitter and I occasionally read some of his blog posts. Last month he wrote a post entitled, “An Unshakeable Kingdom: How Cognitive Dissonance Explains Christianity.” It shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler alert to say that I wasn’t convinced. Still, I initially wasn’t going to write a critique of it, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that there was a deeper issue at play within the issues Hartke raises in his post. It has to do with various assumptions people—both Christians and non-Christians—tend to hold about the Christian take on “apocalypticism” and how Jesus and his disciples viewed the “end times,” Old Testament prophecy, and the Kingdom of God itself.

On top of that, I’ve had this nagging idea in my mind probably for the past 25 years regarding time and reality itself, and how that relates to Christianity, that I’ve never tried to articulate. I think I’m finally going to try in this post. First things first, though. Let’s summarize Hartke’s post here in Part 1. You can read his entire post here. And you can watch him read his post on YouTube Here.

A Summary of Hartke’s “Unshakeable Kingdom” Post
Harke begins by talking about how unusual and odd the early Christian proclamation must have sounded. In contrast to the traditional Jewish Messianic hope for the establishment of the Kingdom of God and the defeat of their enemies, Jesus’ disciples proclaimed the Kingdom had, in fact, arrived…but only in part. The full consummation was still yet to come. Scholars describe this early Christian proclamation as inaugurated eschatology—the “already/not yet” Kingdom of God. I remember Gordon Fee teaching this in my classes at Regent College. Harke highlights the work of New Testament scholar N.T. Wright on this topic as well. The point is simple: the climax of history and of God’s covenant with the Jews has happened, but just not in the way anyone had expected.

Given that fact, Hartke asks the basic question: Why did the followers of Jesus talk like this? How do we account for this remarkable feature of early Christian belief? Simply put, what caused them to proclaim all this? Hartke notes that Christians, as seen in N.T. Wright’s work, say the reason for this proclamation of Christian inaugurated eschatology is rooted in the historical reality that Jesus really did rise from the dead and God had really poured out the Holy Spirit on His followers on the Day of Pentecost. It was a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, but just in a way that no one had expected.

Hartke, though, doesn’t find that answer plausible for one, simple reason: It’s been 2,000 years and there still is a whole lot of crap in the world. As Harke echoes Paula Fredriksen, another New Testament scholar, “shouldn’t the ‘day of the Lord’ look a little different from the day before?” Instead, according to Hartke, what Christ supposedly “fulfilled” was all the “spiritual” stuff that we can’t see and that, consequently, can be subjectively interpreted. All the actual objective, historical stuff that can actually be “nailed down,” so to speak, those are the parts that Christians are still waiting to be fulfilled.

And if it’s been 2,000 years, at what point do we start asking, “Perhaps the rise of Christianity didn’t happen because Jesus really rose from the dead. Maybe there’s another explanation. Hartke thinks he has found a convincing explanation: Jesus’ followers suffered from Cognitive Dissonance. That is what he argues for in the rest of his post.

You can read his fuller explanation in his post, but for our purposes, let me quote something and summarize the argument as a whole. First, here is how Hartke defines “cognitive dissonance”: The state of mental discomfort or tension that people experience when their beliefs, values, or behaviors come into conflict with their experience of the world, or when they hold two ideas that are psychologically at odds with each other.” Thus, when something happens in the real world that challenges a believer’s faith, that believer will try to find a way to explain away the dissonance and thereby hold on to his faith. Therefore, Hartke argues that when it comes to Jesus’ disciples, as with many other religious movements, “believers tend to respond to failed prophecy in ways that reaffirm their faith.” Simply put, they reinterpret those failed prophecies to something more ethereal and then claim they really were fulfilled, but just in a “spiritual” way. In that way, their claims become unfalsifiable.

The more modern example Hartke holds up is the 19^th century Millerite movement. The Millerites, headed by Baptist minister William Miller, interpreted the Book of Daniel in a certain way as to conclude that the Second Coming of Christ, where he would return to set up his kingdom, would happen on October 22, 1844. Well, he didn’t, and that left the Millerites despondent and confused. Soon, though, one of them named Hiram Edson, and later another woman named Ellen Harmon (later known as Ellen G. White, yes the same Ellen G. White who found Seventh Day Adventism and championed the early form of Young Earth Creationism!) claimed they just had interpreted the Book of Daniel wrong. Jesus really had returned, but not to earth—he returned to the heavenly sanctuary.

Thus, Hartke argues, what happened with the Millerites has happened with other apocalyptic groups…and thus that is probably what happened with Jesus’ followers. After all, when the disciples accompanied Jesus to Jerusalem for Passover in AD 33, they were expecting “the kingdom of God to appear immediately, a kingdom in which all the saints would be raised, the wicked would be judged, Jesus would be given authority over all the earth, and the disciples would rule by his side as representatives of the restored twelve tribes of Israel.” But instead, Jesus was arrested and crucified—end of story. Thus, the disciples were left in a similar position as the Millerites. Either give up the movement or reinterpret things to keep it going.

Hartke argues that did what the Millerites did. In fact, he draws four similarities between the two:

1. Just as the Millerites took the event that caused them embarrassment and turned it into something to be memorialized, the disciples took the tragic death of Jesus and claimed he was “resurrected up to heaven” and allows them to find a “powerful meaning in his death.”
2. By splitting up the expected eschaton of Judaism where the resurrection of everyone would happen at the same time when the Kingdom of God would arrive (Christians said Jesus’ resurrection had to happen first, with everyone else’s resurrection coming later with the arrival of the Kingdom of God), Harke claims the disciples “mutated” their expectations in the same way that many other apocalyptic groups did.
3. The New Testament writers went back and reinterpreted numerous Old Testament prophecies, just like the Millerites reinterpreted their previous interpretation of the Book of Daniel—“spiritualizing” parts of those prophecies and shoving the rest of the fulfillments to those prophecies into the far future.
4. And, just like the Millerites, the early Christians simply said that had initially misunderstood those original Old Testament prophecies, as well as various prophecies Jesus himself had declared—like when, in Mark 10, he told them he was going to die, but they continued to talk about who would sit on his right and left hand in his kingdom; or when, in John 2, when Jesus spoke of his body being destroyed then raised up in three days, and they thought he was talking about the literal Temple.

Hartke argues that many historical Jesus scholars feel that these “misunderstandings” that are recorded in the Gospels—the very writings of the early Christians—are just too hard to swallow. After all, the writers are saying, “Oh, yes, we used to think this, but after Jesus’ death and resurrection, we know realize we didn’t understand what Jesus was saying originally. We now know it really means this. In Hartke’s words, “That alone should raise some big red flags.”

Hartke concludes his post with this: “Faced with the dissonance between expectation and reality, the early Christians doubled down on their commitment to the belief that Jesus was Israel’s true Messiah and that as the Messiah he was inaugurating the reign of God, but in doing so they had to radically modify their ideas about what that reign would look like and how the Messiah would bring it about. Before his death, Jesus’ followers looked forward to a kingdom that would change everything. After his death, they took refuge in a kingdom that could not be changed by anything. And that, perhaps more than anything else, explains both the triumph and the tragedy of Christianity.”

So, do you find argument convincing? I don’t. But since I see this post is already at about 1,600 words, I will have to wait until the next post to actually write my critique! If nothing else, I hope this post serves as a decent summary of his larger 5,000-word post.