Peter Kirk has collected a series of his comments into a single post along with links to various blogs that can bring you up to date on the atonement wars. I weighed in with a post over on my Participatory Bible Study blog. I see that Coops hasn’t posted in his atonement series since March 19th.
I know how it can go. One can get really, really tangled discussing the atonement!
A discussion has been raging over on the Religion Forum, and Tom Sims has taken it up on his blog regarding Bishop Spong and a quote (Rochester, MN Post-Bulletin) in which he says:
“Religion in America today embarrasses me,” said Spong, 75, who will speak in Rochester next week. “If that’s what Christianity is all about, then I’m not really interested in that.”
Of course the question is clearly just what Bishop Spong thinks Christianity is actually about. Frankly, while Spong is one of the more popular characters in modern liberal Christianity, he is by no means the most thoughtful, in my view. In fact, when it gets right down to it, I don’t find his historical reconstructions I find him one of the least credible of the writers on the historical Jesus.
He makes one excellent point, however, in the interview I cited, when he tells us that the problem comes in when someone claims that their way is the only way it can be. I’m one of those “embarrassments” who believes in the resurrection. Once I’ve swallowed a doctrine like the incarnation, it hardly seems a matter of concern. Could I be wrong? Of course I could! I’ve been wrong before, am quite probably wrong about many things right now, and I suspect I will go right on being wrong until I die.
Especially in matters of theology we do well to walk and talk humbly, simply because when dealing with the infinite we are by definition infinitely ignorant. We have to recognize that very often the more rational option is to simply admit that we don’t really know. But I, and others like me, have a category of experience to describe, and it is religious language and even religious doctrines that describes it.
For Bishop Spong, however, and for many in the Jesus Seminar, one has to ask just how Christian their Jesus actually is. I do not arrogate to myself the right to judge whether they are Christians or not, or what their relationship to God might be. My question is simply one of picking up their views and making them my own.
I recall the series of stories by Isaac Asimov which are set at the dinners of the Black Widowers. Each guest was asked one major question: How do you justify your existence? I think the question that needs to be asked of Spong’s Jesus is the same one: How do you justify your existence? When one limits oneself to a purely historical reconstruction, and one done with a seriously skeptical turn of mind, then the resulting “Jesus” is often rather weak, and one has to wonder why anyone should care whether such a person lived.
In the historical sense, one might make the question instead whether the Jesus one has discovered by historical research would be likely to have had the impact that he had. The one thing I always find when I think about Jesus in purely historical terms is that in the end I’m certain that Jesus must be more than what I can prove him to be historically, otherwise there is an excessive effect for the cause involved. In some ways, however, the Jesus of Spong fits well with American Christianity–tepid and not terribly challenging.
There are a number of things about American Christianity that do embarrass me, though they don’t primarily have to do with doctrinal beliefs.
I’m embarrassed
I’m embarrassed, but I don’t dwell on it, except for posts like this. Mostly I just try to help alleviate that situation in the little corner where I am.
There was an encouraging story in the Pensacola News Journal titled Big difference in Sudan about Jim Esson who is returning to the Sudan and working on building a medical clinic. This is a very positive form of mission activity.
In the comments someone complains that the mission is out of town while there are still people in need locally. But there are many different forms of service, and we don’t need to choose just one. There are plenty of resources available; what we need is the willingness to use them wherever there are needs.
It appears a couple are threatened with offending Hindu sensibilities for their wedding, according to this story from the Evening Standard (London). (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars.) This is an Indian case, and due to the fame of one of the participants there is some indication India won’t pursue it.
Those who approve of laws against “hate speech” or various similar restrictions on freedom of speech should be warned, however, that no matter what your views, this could be you.
This is a serious danger to freedom, especially in cases of religion. When a government makes “offending” any class of religious people a legal offense, there is virtually no barrier before any speech whatsoever can be banned. What can I possibly say that will not blaspheme somebody’s religion. I do not believe Mohammed was a prophet. I’ve offended Muslims. That belief should be no surprise, however. I’m a Christian. I don’t think cartoons or art mocking Islam should be illegal, no matter how offensive Muslims find them. But note that at the same time I don’t think cartoons or art mocking Christianity, Christians, or major Christian figures should be illegal either. That’s freedom of speech. If you’re easy to offend, get used to being offended.
Of course many non-Christians will agree with me on that point, but I again let me extend that further. Hate speech laws that target conservative Christian criticism of other religions or homosexuality, for example, are also anti-freedom. I often really don’t like the categories of speech they forbid, but that’s not the point.
Let freedom of speech reign, and let’s all learn to be less offended by it.
The attack on moderation, or excluding the middle (broadly conceived) and the assumption that this is all there is are the two key points of disagreement, from which most everything else follows.
The assumption that this physical universe is all that exists is illustrated in the discussion of the multiverse theory (pp. 145-147). Now do not take this too far. I’m actually attracted by the multiverse theory as he expresses it. It’s obviously speculation, but it’s enjoyable speculation at least, and may even point in the right direction in years to come. My knowledge of physics is too small to go any further than that.
But for me the question still remains–who is the creator? At some point you do have to get to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The environment in which the universes of the multiverse exist, such as to be subjected to natural selection must exist, and thus you only push the question back another step. Now, instead of asking where the universe comes from, you must ask where the multiverse comes from. The universe is clearly not nearly so universal as we thought (if these speculations are true). It is naturally caused by the multiverse.
This should be familiar to those who have studied arguments for the existence of God. The question frequently comes back to where God comes from. But that is the point of that particular category of argument. Because nothing else is self-existent, we look for a self-existent source for other things, because it seems pretty clear that something must be self-existent. (Of course it may indeed be “turtles all the way down!”)
At the same time if we admit that something is self-existent we have already taken a step beyond anything we understand within the physical world. We’re imagining something that’s so far out of the box that it’s, well, out of the universe, or perhaps even out of the multiverse. At this point, I think I’m making one of the best arguments for agnosticism. Whatever is the ultimate cause or “ground of all being” (Tillich), is not something we can measure according to the standards we know.
Thus I find it totally irrelevant, though interesting, for Dawkins to claim that God must be “very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!” Well, yes. And if theists in general were asserting that God had first evolved into what he is and then created the universe, that would be relevant. But this is a clear example of Dawkins assumption that even God must be natural. He first defines God into the natural universe and then argues against him, but that is simply a complex way of assuming one’s conclusions. As it is, it kind of misses the point.
What theists are saying is that there simply is no natural force that can produce the creator, period, so the creator is something that is outside of our physical universe, who operates according to very different laws.
For a contrary view more conservative than mine, see Christianity and Secularism by Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. (My company publishes that book.)
[This is part of my series of responses to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. The parent entry is From the Land of the Deluded.]
I truly have to wonder to what extent Dawkins is arguing in favor of freedom, and to what extent he is arguing in favor of the enforcement of his own scientific ideas. For example, starting on page 311, Dawkins tells us the story of a young boy taken from his Jewish parents by authorities in 19th century Italy because he had been baptized by a maid, and was therefore Catholic. This is truly an excellent example of something bad done by religion. We can and should deplore what was done. I think he diminishes the impact of his case by in turn criticizes the parents for being faithful to their own religious beliefs:
. . . It would be grossly unjust to equate the two sides in this case, but this is as good a place as any to note taht the Mortaras could at a stroke have had Edgardo back, if only they had accepted the priests’ entreaties and agreed to be baptized themselves. Edgardo had been stolen in the first place because of a splash of water and a dozen meaningless words. Such is the fatuousness of the religiously indoctrinated mind, another pair of splashes is all it would have taken to reverse the process. to some of us, the parents’ refusal indicates wanton stubbornness. To others, their principled stand elevates them into the long list of martyrs for all religions down the ages.
There are two elements of this criticism that I want to note. First, there is the assumption that the parents cannot truly be convinced of their own position. It is only through indoctrination that they could hold that position. Raised freely, they would, presumably, have agreed with Dawkins. Second, there is an assumption that going along with an irrational requirement is an acceptable option. Now on many issues I would tend to go along with something irrational simply because it was not worth the effort of fighting it. I suspect this second assumption is unconscious, that Dawkins does not, in fact, believe that going along with tyranny is an effective strategy.
But as we continue through the book, we come to the case of the Amish (pp. 329-331), the shoe is on the other foot, and now Dawkins is going to decide for the parents just how they are to raise their children. Apparently we are to assume that the goals that Dawkins has for society are necessarily better than the goals that the Amish have. For the type of society in which the Amish wish to live, their educational system is quite well suited. But here again we make an assumption that a maximum pursuit of technological and scientific progress is the best route for all of humanity.
Now I happen to prefer the future that Dawkins envisions on this point. He’s made queasy by the idea of letting the Amish children stay where they are. I’m made queasy by the notion of forcibly removing them and altering their culture simply because he (and in this case I) believe they would be better off. In that battle, my choice is to give up my vision for their lives and allow their parents to make those early choices.
This is not, however, as easy of a decision as many on both sides will probably believe. Many on the Christian side will argue that we should definitely give parents the freedom to choose how to raise their own children. But we don’t do that in fact. There are many things that a parent is not permitted to do in our society, including various forms of abuse and definitely murder. This has not always been true in all societies. There is a tension here between freedom and diversity and “the best interests of the child” that will always make issues such as this one a bit difficult to settle.
Nonetheless I find the combination of attitudes that Dawkins expresses interesting, to say the least.
A couple of weeks ago I made the mistake of trying to reply to a point in Plantinga’s review of The God Delusion, and got caught. The first commenter on that post suggested I should read the actual book “if only to be able to evaluate reviews of a different book going by the same title.”
Well, I have now read the book, and it was less irritating than I expected, though my expectations were fulfilled. In general, I was not surprised by anything Dawkins had to say. This should not be shocking considering that I have studied Christian theology fairly extensively for a non-theologian (I remind readers that my field is Biblical studies, not theology, and thus at theology I am an amateur), and I have also read a good bit of Dawkins’s writing, and I am very fond of it, even though I recognize that I am precisely the type of Christian theist for which he has the greatest contempt. This latter point is repeatedly emphasized in the text of The God Delusion.
There is, however, one way in which the book is worse than I expected. I linked earlier to a post by Bruce Alderman, in which he performed a humorous source analysis on this text. I got a good laugh out of it, but at the time I was assuming it was pure humor. Having read the book, I think I can build on his analysis.
Bruce’s H source writes much like the Richard Dawkins of books like The Blind Watchmaker. He does surgery on ideas with a laser scalpel, coming to specific points, and then rebuilding the structure with care and precision. You may disagree with his conclusions, but you normally do so by debating his premises, not by criticizing his logic. Such a person presumably wrote most of chapter 5. There, even though I disagree with some conclusions about religion in general, we find an excellent presentation of Darwinian explanations for the evolution of religion, or a propensity to religion in humanity.
I originally intended to say that Bruce’s A source, contrary to H, uses a shotgun approach, but on further reading and reflection I don’t think that is an adequate description. The approach would better be compared to the use of a blunderbuss, a weapon to which I was introduced by Tolkien in “Farmer Giles of Ham.” There the question of what a blunderbuss is received this response:
Indeed this very question, it is said, was put to the Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford, and after thought they replied, “A blunderbuss is a short gun with a large bore firing many balls or slugs, and capable of doing execution within a limited range without exact aim. (Now superseded in civilized countries by other firearms.)
However, Farmer Giles’s blunderbuss had a wide mouth that opened like a horn, and it did not fire balls or slugs, but anything he could spare to stuff in.
The aforementioned farmer Giles of Ham used a blunderbuss on a giant with the result that:
. . . By luck it was pointed more or less at the giant’s large ugly face. Out flew the rubbish, and the stones and the bones, and the bits of crock and wire, and half a dozen nails. And since the range was indeed limited, by chance and no choice of the farmer’s many of these things struck the giant; a piece of pot went in his eye, and a large nail stuck in his nose.
“Blast!” said the giant in his vulgar fashion. “I’m stung!” . . .
So DawkinsA has loaded his blunderbuss with whatever was available, pointed it in my general direction (or perhaps I stuck my face in front of it), and fired. And thus, in the words of the giant, “Blast! I’m stung.” Well, actually, not so much, and unlike Tolkien’s giant I have no inclination to turn aside.
Those who haven’t dealt with the vagaries of source and redaction criticism will perhaps get less amusement from Bruce’s analysis or from my aside, but those who have will recognize the stylistic differences that can make one wonder what happened between one passage and the next. I think this is also the problem that resulted in the exchange in the comments to my previous post. Basically you can get two completely different impressions from reading this book. The first is of a proposed dialog which invites a broad range of people who are opposed to placing religious dogma above science, of indoctrination, of forcing religious beliefs on people, and of limiting the freedom of scientific inquiry. The second is of a desire to suppress religion if it is possible to do so by any means short of violence, and describes all people of any variety of religious faith in disparaging terms.
There is one basic element that I fully expected, and did in fact find. For Dawkins science is all there is. There is no supernatural of any kind, and his use of the term “supernatural” is not so nuanced as that of some theologians. For him, “supernatural” is anything that cannot in theory at least be fully investigated by scientific means.
Thus he occasionally indicates that he is not arguing against the guy in the sky with a beard concept of God, yet in practice he is arguing against the philosophical equivalent. His God must be measurable and explainable in natural terms, thus any attributes one supposes God might possess that do not fall within that scope are automatically dismissed.
Dawkins operates with a thoroughgoing ontological naturalism. This is it. If I were to allow him that assumption, generally implicit, we could simply say, “That’s the ball game.” And in fact most of the book is superfluous for the simple reason that Dawkins never allows a supernatural definition of God to come into play at all. Despite what he says, God is not a hypothesis. He would be a rather bad hypothesis if he were one.
While Dawkins does not believe in God, he appears to believe he has god-like powers. Repeatedly he suggests that the religious faith of scientists or other thinkers whose work he appreciates were not really sincere, but rather went along with their time. Such is the case with Kant (footnote to p. 231, quoting A. C. Grayling favorably), Mendel (p. 99 becoming a monk was ” . . . equivalent of a research grant.”), the American founding fathers (p. 39 – “. . . the greatest of them might have been atheists. Certainly their writings on religion in their own time leave me in no doubt that most of them would have been atheists in ours.”).
It’s astonishing how easy it is to know what someone would have been years after the fact!
In my view, more even than an attack on belief, this book is an attack on moderation. By moderation I mean any system that does not automatically push for the extremes, but recognizes that there are a range of positions between. I do not mean that one has to accept that those other positions have an equal claim to truth; I simply suggest recognizing that they exist. Dawkins wants the conflict to be between fundamentalists of any religion and atheism. He objects to being called a fundamentalist atheist, but this very attitude suggests that in some ways the title fits. My experience with Christian fundamentalists indicates to me that if you disagree with them in any little thing, you are the enemy. I’m often called an atheist by such people because I accept the theory of evolution. Dawkins has problems with all of the folks in the middle, with moderates being a frequent target. (For notes on my view of moderation, see Moderate Thinking.)
I’m going to divide this response into several posts, though I will post them all together. A directory follows, though you can find the entire series by choosing category The God Delusion.
So from the land of the deluded, let me present just a bit of a response. I’m not an apologist. I’m frequently embarrassed by what Christian apologists have to say. My apologetic is very simple, and we sang it in the Easter Sunrise service at my church: “You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart.” It’s subjective. I don’t expect it to convince you. But it’s what I bring to the table. Categorize me as a deluded simpleton, but a joyful one!
Easter seems to be the time of the year for a strong Christian affirmation. It’s not a time when most Christians want to be thinking about secular topics, or considering difficulties with their faith.
But as I am fond of reminding people, Easter morning followed Good Friday, and that year in Palestine Good Friday was really not very good at all. Jesus was on the wrong side as far as those in power were concerned. He was a threat to public order and to their power, and they felt the need to get rid of him. One answer among many to the question of why Jesus had to die is simply that people who behaved like he did in 1st century Palestine were very likely to die like he did. On first read, that may sound like I’m belittling the crucifixion, but I suspect if you think about it further, you may see what I’m talking about.
As modern American Christians, we are quite willing to go along with the Easter morning scenario, though we forget that only a few saw Jesus after the resurrection and there was no great triumph in the streets of Jerusalem proclaiming the victory of Jesus over death itself. Nonetheless, we like the idea of “showing them” and letting them know just who’s in charge. One way to get a cheer out of a Christian audience these days is to shout “Jesus is Lord!” It’s a good cheer, and I even like it. But the serious question is this: Lord of what?
According to the gospel of John when Jesus was asked about this by Pilate (John 18:33-37), he said that his kingdom was not of this world. If it had been, he would have had his disciples fighting. And that’s the hard part. Christianity calls for the “Good Friday” attitude in us, but most of us have a good deal of trouble accepting that. What we want is the name of the crucified Jesus but the power of the Roman soldiers who nailed him to the cross.
So why would these thoughts lead me to think about a secular society. Well, for one thing, my attention was called to it by the blog against theocracy. But I immediately started thinking about the term theocracy, and all the things it might mean to be against theocracy, and soon I was lost in definition land. So I just want to write a little bit about why I, as a Christian, don’t want a Christian government (a phrase that requires some definition as well), and why I think that’s the best thing for Christianity and for individual Christians.
My basic understanding of the gospel message stems directly from the incarnation. I really, really believe in the incarnation as the big miracle of Christianity. It seems to me that this must form the core of our belief system. We do not merely believe in good ethics; we believe in ethics empowered by a God who reached out to us in this fashion, crossing the gap between infinity and the finite. Having done that, he called on us to make disciples, “new creatures” as Paul would have it (2 Corinthians 5:17). I believe that anything and everything that distracts us from this one point diminishes Christianity.
Over our history we have repeatedly tried to use force to make other people believe or practice our faith. But that is precisely what God did not do. God condescended, reached down, emptied himself (Philippians 2:5-11), became one of us, took a human-eye view of things for a little while.
I believe in separation of church and state not so much because it is a constitutional principle (and I do believe it is; many principles are named with words not actually found in the text), but because I think the church endangers itself when it takes any other power than the power of God’s sacrificial love as manifested in Jesus Christ.
That gives us one and only one option for making this nation or the world a Christian nation–the voluntary, unforced, unmanipulated, free choice of every individual to be a Christian.
On the other hand, it gives us a very powerful approach to all the problems of the world–the gospel of Jesus Christ. The good news that Jesus is willing to touch and to heal, that there is a way to transform lives, one person at a time. The task may seem overwhelming, but there are also a lot of Christians out there, and a lot of resources. They are just being used to maintain church buildings and keep the membership happy in maintenance mode.
We need to start at the bottom, just like Jesus did, with people who desperately need help and hope. The church has the ability to solve problems on a broad scale if we put our resources to work in the right way. And note that I do not mean abandon the gospel message in favor of becoming a social service agency. We need social services driven by the message of the incarnation–servant, even slave evangelists ready to take the message of Jesus and the loving touch of his current body to the world.
For that we don’t need the power of the government. Governmental power works much like idolatry–constantly calling us to something less than we are supposed to do.
I don’t mean that Christians need to get out of politics or lose our moral voice, though I would suggest we broaden it quite a bit. I do not mean that we should not talk about our faith. I do mean that we should reject seeking government sponsorship for any religious activities, because those activities will, without exception, become diluted.
Let’s use our one tool. Let’s live a life worthy of the incarnation.
PS: I posted two other Easter meditations, Continually Translating the Message and an Easter short story (fiction) Easter Morning Resurrection.
I got home from the sunrise service at my church, and found some really nice easter messages on the RSS feed to the Moderate Christian Blogroll.
Enjoy!
