Introduction

At the time of this writing, I am 46 years old.

I am well into the fifth decade of my life and in that period of time I have see and heard numerous “end of the world” prophesies. Be they religious or secular (ie scientistic), I have probably seen a dozen or so cataclysmic proclamations come and go, and I’ve watched those who propounded them either slink away in shame, reduced to a laughing stock, or engage in a tremendous amount of ass-covering rationalization to try to explain away their failure.

Whether it was a looming ice age, catastrophic global warming, or the return of Jesus in election year 1988, I’ve seen them come, and I’ve watched the predictions fail…often spectacularly. Full admission, 12 year old me (1988) had some anxiety but by the time that the ice caps were supposed to have melted (2012), my attitude had shifted to a more “Yeah…whatever,” frame.

To say that I am cynical in the face of such predictions would be something of an understatement. What’s funny is that I am the one that gets mocked for not believing such dire prognostications simply because I have seen so many go feet up when the prophesy–there’s really no better word for it–fails.

Some years ago, a social psychologist by the name of Leon Festinger proposed a fascinating theory as to why people will sometimes engage in behaviors that are contrary to the facts presented. This theory was dubbed cognitive dissonance theory.

Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person is confronted with a set of facts that contradicts an established set of beliefs. The person, assuming that they seek have consistency in their beliefs, can set about to engage in a set of rationalizing exercises to bring the facts into alignment with their beliefs. This rationalization can take a number of forms from outright modification of behavior to justification, to justification with modification, to just outright denial.

See also: Was the Resurrection a Hallucination?

As Festinger notes in the opening of the landmark study titled, When Prophesy Fails,

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.[1]

Undoubtedly we have encountered any number of people who are like this, on any number of subjects. They seem unreasonable, cantankerous, or just outright silly, but sometimes–and here’s the really fascinating part–the problem isn’t them, per se. Rather the problem might be us.

Are we the one who isn’t willing to listen, or consider, or engage?

To that end, cognitive dissonance is something of a double-edged sword as it is capable of cutting in both directions, often at the same time, so it must be wielded carefully, thoughtfully, and used more as a scalpel than a club.

In my experience, probably the best examples of cognitive dissonance is in the debate between young earth creationists and so-called old earth creationists, or between those who believe in a global flood and those who are convinced that the flood was regional but had a significant impact on the ancient world.[2] I have essentially come to the conclusion that the argument is simply one of degrees that needs to be understood in the original context of the writers of Scripture, coming down to the question of whether there must necessarily be concordance with the facts or whether a measure of accommodation must be assumed.

This is important because it goes directly to the issue of cognitive dissonance and how we resolve difficulties between what we believe (eg the truth of Scripture) and the “facts”.

Just the Facts

There is a intentional reason why the word facts is in scare-quotes. The reason being that often what is asserted as a “fact” is often just an extended assumption.

There is a difference between saying, “It is a fact that a molecule of water is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen” and “It is a fact that water is wet”. There is a tremendous amount of philosophical explanation that goes into explaining the differences between the two statements but it suffices to say that the former is a statement of fact in relation to the composition of water, what we can call a concrete fact, and the latter statement being a fact in relation to experience, what we would call a relative fact.

Let’s say that you were to get onto a spaceship and travel to a distant world that was only covered in ice, and that you encountered lifeforms there with whom you were able to communicate. Your alien friend could understand the concept of the concrete fact of the composition of water, because he was surrounded by it. However the relative fact of water’s wetness would cause a measure of dissonance due to his experience with water being “hard” due to his living on an ice world and never having seen liquid water.

Even our experience of water cannot be qualified beyond certain bounds as we experience it not just in liquid form, but also in solid and vapor form. So, in some sense, the word fact can become slippery in relative understanding where it is functioning as an assumption.

But where else might this assumption find expression?

Evolution is one of those places in that there are certain assumptions made that often do not fit the evidence, most often this is seen in the so-called “tree of life” that intends to demonstrate genetic relationships between the various animals on the planet from its start to its present via mutation, inheritance, and natural selection.

Not to dive too deeply into the matter here, but it suffices to say that the number of assumptions between the concrete fact of evolution and the relative fact of it often get deliberately blurred to confusion by failing to answer one question: where do we find the competition of such related species operating in the same time period?

That is a question that I have not heard a satisfactory answer to, yet.

We also find similar avenues in matters of translations of the Bible, believe it or not. Just start presenting someone who is thoroughly enamoured with the Authorized or King James Version with the textual data and theological reasoning to address some of the problems with the translation and the dissonance begins.[3]

What does any of this have to do with prophecy, you might ask. Here again, Festinger provides insight:

Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.[4]

There is a necessary correlation between what someone claims to believe and what they do, as he points out, especially in regard to proselytizing movements.

These movements are usually built around a single charismatic central figure or group of individuals making claims about revelatory events that are set to occur in the near future, often sprouting from established groups where there is some form of eschatological end assumed by the larger group that is exploited and pronounced as imminent by the proclaiming figure or group.

One of the most ancient examples that Festinger cites is the heresy of Montanism.[5] This particular belief system is somewhat difficult to nail down because, so little is known about it from primary sources, however it was marked by ecstatic worship, rigorous asceticism, and strict moral ethicism. And while they did not necessarily deny any core doctrines (eg deity of Christ) what caused them to be labeled as heretical was their unhealthy focus on prophecy and began to see themselves less as messengers of God but as direct conduits for God to speak, and as such directly overrule established tradition or authority.

What is key to this is something that Festinger and his colleagues note,

There are convinced followers; they commit themselves by uprooting their lives and going to a new place where they build a new town; the Second Advent does not occur. And, we note, far from halting the movement, this dis-confirmation gives it new life.[6]

There is some measure of truth to that as Montanism–or forms of it–did continue under its own momentum into the fourth century, with rumors of flare-ups into the ninth.

Festinger and co., note several other instances in Christian history, including the Anabaptist revolt in the 16th century, all of which have similar features. Most interesting is his appeal to a Jewish experience in the 17th century where the leader of a kabbalistic sect was captured by the Turkish sultan, eventually converting to Islam.[7]

This conversion, some of Sabbatai Zevi’s disciples argued at the time, confirmed his messiah-ship, while others saw it as an invitation follow their leader in converting to Islam.[8] This gets extended historically into the nineteenth century in the example of the Millerite movement, which evolved into Seventh Day Adventism, and gave rise to the Jehovah’s Witnesses movement and their own failed prophetic predictions.

Each of these examples are marked with similar rises and falls. The fall either results in complete collapse or a mutation that seeks to prove that the prophesy was fulfilled but in some invisible or spiritual way that only the “true believers” can accept. However, there are instances where the data is ambiguous, where there are parallels but there is also divergence, as Festinger notes,

Historical records are replete with further instances of similar movements of a millennial or messianic character. Unfortunately for our purpose, however, in most instances the data which would be relevant to our hypotheses are totally absent. Even in cases where considerable data are available, there will frequently be some crucial point which is equivocal, thus destroying the cogent relevance to our hypotheses.[9]

I would like to note that one of the reasons that there do appear to be parallels is in the employment of the terms “millennial” and “messianic” as these are terms that only exist due to one context having introduced them into the lexicon of human experience. That context is the Christian context.

Historical Parallelism

In their examination of the various movements, Festinger and Co., identified five general characteristics common to the subjects that they studied. Those characteristics are,[10]

  1. A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.
  2. The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo.
  3. The belief must be sufficiently specific and  concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
  4. Such undeniable confirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
  5. The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

Festinger and Co., note that there are touch-points where one can see similarities between the rise of Christianity and the later movements, all of which depend on the terms and presuppositions of Christianity to merely exist.[11] However, they also admit that there is evidence that causes a problem in the application of their hypothesis to Christianity as a movement, so much so that they are reluctant to consider the question any farther, but turn back to examining their prior examples.[12]

The reluctance of Fetstinger and his associates to make such an application isn’t shared by all, in fact it is asserted by some to be the best possible explanation. One in particular has recently made that argument. That one being Matthew Hartke, who describes himself as “a post-Christian Bible nerd endlessly fascinated with the questions of how Christianity began and why it took the shape that it did.”

In the next section, we will get into Hartke’s article and examine it.

Notes

  1. Leon Festinger, et al. When Prophecy Fails. University of Minnesota Press. 1956. p. 3
  2. These discussions can be explored in greater detail The Lost World series by John Walton, et al.
  3. I am using “problem” here in a guarded sense. This is not to say that the King James translation is a bad translation, rather it’s to note that as a translation it has deficiencies that studies into the original language as well as textual discoveries have made it severely antiquated as  representative of the original sources underlying it.
  4. Festinger, et al, p. 3
  5. Ibid, p. 6ff
  6. Ibid, p. 7
  7. Ibid, p. 8ff
  8. Ibid, p. 12
  9. Ibid, p. 23
  10. Ibid, p. 4
  11. Ibid, p. 23-4
  12. Ibid, p. 25