Monthly Archives: June 2010

There’s a degree to which it’s legitimate to claim Judeo-Christian roots for almost all Western philosophies (including the scientism that seeks, in its more recent and ugly manifestations, to destroy religious faith altogether), but Existentialism has a special claim, I think. Most wide-scale histories of the movement include an early space for religious belief. Walter Kaufmann, himself no great friend to Christianity, is typical. In his Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre—one of the earliest anthologies of existentialist writing and thought—he tries to find a precursor to Dostoevsky: “If we look for anything remotely similar in the long past of European literature, we do not find it in philosophy but, most nearly, in such Christian writers as Augustine and Pascal.” It seems odd to me that Augustine and Pascal do not qualify as philosophy in Kaufmann’s mind—they are, let us agree, artistic works, possibly in addition to philosophical works—but he reads the line of influence correctly: “it is in Christianity, against the background of belief in original sin, that we first find this wallowing in man’s depravity and this uncompromising concentration on the dark side of man’s inner life.”

William Barrett—whose 1958 text Irrational Man is, by my lights anyway, the single best introduction to the movement—rightly goes even further back to find the source of Existentialism. He takes Matthew Arnold’s distinction between Hellenism and Hebraism (a distinction fleshed out even further in Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man) and classes nineteenth- and twentieth-century Existentialist thinkers in the latter group:

The Law, however, is not really at the center of Hebraism. At the center lies that which is the foundation and the basis of the Law, and without which the Law, even in the most Pharisaical tradition, would be but an empty shell. Here we have to think beyond Arnold. To be sure, the Law—the absolutely binding quality of its ritual and commandments—has been what has held the Jewish community together over its centuries of suffering and prevented this people from extermination. But if we go back to the Hebraic sources, to man as he is revealed to us in the Bible, we see that something more primitive and more fundamental lies at the basis of the moral law.

Barrett, like Kaufmann, finds the roots of Existentialism not in works of straight philosophy but in artistic works, in this case the Book of Job, sometimes referred to as literature’s first “novel”; in order to understand early Existentialism, says Barrett, “We have to learn to reread the Book of Job . . . in a way that takes us beyond Arnold and into our own time, reread it with an historical sense of the primitive or primary mode of existence of the people who gave expression to this work.”

Job has lost its power in the modern world, Barrett claims, because we feel relatively protected, both from the world around us and from a kind and forgiving “god without thunder,” to use John Crowe Ransom’s phrase. This was not true for the book’s initial audience:

For earlier man, the outcome of the Book of Job was not such a foregone conclusion as it is for us later readers, for whom centuries of familiarity and forgetfulness have dulled the violence of the confrontation between man and God that is central to the narrative. For earlier man, seeing for the first time beyond the routine commandments of his religion, there was a Promethean excitement in Job’s coming face to face with his Creator and demanding justification.

What Barrett leaves out in this description, of course, are the facts that lead up to this demand. Job is about belief systems that had seemed stable being turned on their head. Job and God seem to have an implicit arrangement at the beginning of the book: Job will live uprightly, and God will bless him (or at least keep him from the really terrible things of life). But this arrangement is shattered by the cosmic bet between God and Satan, and the entire foundation of Job’s life is shattered. The operative question of the bet is whether or not Job will remain Job even after his world turns to mud—that is, whether or not he will remain righteous even when he can’t find an immediately good reason for doing so.

The arguments set forth by his friends—almost all of which involve Job harboring some “secret sin” that makes him deserve the suffering he’s experiencing—are apt to seem rather ridiculous to readers who are familiar with Christ’s declaration that God “causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45, NAS). But of course such arguments are still used today. I remember my mother coming home crying from church one day because some amateur theologian (who apparently was familiar with neither Matthew nor Job) had told her that my sister’s recently diagnosed diabetes was the product of some sin. No, the Book of Job says, things happen, the reasons for which we will never know.

The crowning glory of the Book of Job is its final third, in which Job does indeed demand an explanation for his suffering from the God who is, after all, in control of all things. Barrett’s observation that, as opposed to similar moments in Greek drama, “The Hebrew . . . proceeds not by the way of reason but by the confrontation of the whole man, Job, in the fullness and violence of his passion with the unknowable and overwhelming God” is instructive here. Job’s complaint to God is not that he has suffered and doesn’t know the reason for it; it’s that God is absent during that suffering. Thus he can cling for awhile to his famous statement that

I know that my Redeemer lives,
And at the last He will take His stand on the earth.
Even after my skin is destroyed,
Yet from my flesh I shall see God.
(19:25-26)

It is, in fact, not until Job claims that he will approach God rationally and tell him what’s what that God appears in the whirlwind to rebuke him. “I would declare to Him the number of my steps,” he tells his friends. “Like a prince I would approach him” (31:37). These are nearly Job’s final words before God appears; Elihu will spend several chapters rebuking him before the main event shows up in chapter 38.

God, let us say, is not pleased by Job’s desire to attack or defend him on logical grounds:

Who is this that darkens counsel
By words without knowledge?
Now gird up your loins like a man,
And I will ask you, and you instruct Me!
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding,
Who set its measurements? Since you know.
Or who stretched the line on it?
On what were its bases sunk?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together
And all the sons of God shouted for joy? (38:2-7)

God thunders on like this for several chapters, and finally Job gives the correct answer: “I retract, / And I repent in dust and ashes” (42:6). Notice that Job is not intellectually convinced by God’s argument—no more than the reader is intellectually convinced by the strange epilogue of the story, which tells us that God gave Job a new wife and new children, as though that made up for all he’d been through. Job’s response to God is a method, a way of living: he bows before Him.

The other major source for existentialism in the Hebrew Bible is Ecclesiastes, a book that has always posed a problem for thinkers who want to make the Bible into a grandly coherent statement. What do we make of this book, which seems to preach nihilism and meaninglessness? It’s often classed as wisdom literature—but how does it fit in with the Psalms and the Proverbs, most of which appeal much more directly to traditional notions of God. But Ecclesiastes opens with an insidious declaration of intent:

“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher,
“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”
What advantage does man have in all his work
Which he does under the sun? (1:2-3)

Notice that holy living is not excluded from this condemnation of human life: “The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet I know that one fate befalls them both” (2:14). The Preacher is clearly operating under what Martin Heidegger would later term being-towards-death—a state which, however grim, opens up potentiality to the person who exists in it. The problem in this case is that it has reduced all potential outcomes to the same sad singularity: nothingness.

There is no epilogue to Ecclesiastes that makes things right—the Preacher doesn’t come back in the final few verses and say that he’s discovered a meaning for his life. All things remain vanity at the end of the book. There is no meaning to suffering that can be discovered: “man cannot discover the work which has been done under the sun. Even though man should seek laboriously, he will not discover; and though the wise man should say, ‘I know,’ he cannot discover” (8:17).

One gets the image of Albert Camus’s Sisyphus, pushing that rock up that hill for all eternity, with no hope that he’ll ever be allowed to stop or be given a more achievable goal. And the Preacher’s advice is strikingly similar to Camus’s: You just have to keep working anyway and hope that maybe eventually something will turn up: “Cast your bread on the surface of the waters, for you will find it after many days” (11:1). As in the Book of Job, a method is prescribed rather than an answer being given—and as in the earlier book, the answer revolves around having faith in a God Whom we can’t see and can’t hope to understand: “Just as you do not know the path of the wind and how bones are formed in the womb of the pregnant woman, so you do not know the activity of God who makes all things” (11:5). Meaning is apparently not for human beings to grasp, but for God alone.

The themes of the Book of Job and of Ecclesiastes would be echoed by existentialist theologians throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. God is absent in an immediate physical sense, these theologians tell us (though they disagree about what that absence signifies), and there is no immediate answer coming to the question of why we suffer. The solution is not an intellectual program, as you might expect, but a method of living: Paul Tillich will tell us to have the “courage to be,” the drive to live in the face of the nothingness all around us; Martin Buber will tell us to find God in the encounter between the I and the Thou; Karl Barth will point to the Book of Job itself, along with the other books of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, and tell us that the only route to God is the only which He has devised, His testimony and revelation. These three thinkers (and most other existentialists, religious or atheist) owe a great deal to Hebraic angst and doubt, and a return to these early books shows the modern reader, again and again, that what he goes through is nothing new.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 4 July 2010 (Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

2 Kings 5:1-14 and Psalm 30 • Isaiah 66:10-14 and Psalm 66:1-9 • Galatians 6:(1-6), 7-16 • Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Having the squirrelly tendencies I have, I wonder how American preachers who preach the lectionary will handle this particular text on July 4.  After all, this is the text that got the crowds so mad at Jesus in Luke 4 when Jesus read it in conjunction with a passage about the year of Jubilee.  But that’s not the most interesting thing happening here.

More interesting than the overt challenge to Israelite nationalism, the interaction here between prophetic utterance, priestly ritual, and royal permission remind me that the category Messiah does not suddenly appear on the scene in the New Testament or even in the Dead Sea Scrolls; with texts like 2 Kings 5 filling the people’s imaginations, apocalyptic and Jewish nationalism are hardly unexpected developments.  These roles are the marks of a spiritual life that the Greek-flavored imperial imagination no doubt considered somewhat underdeveloped intellectually.  Here, centuries after Socrates and in a world that knew Cicero’s skepticism, a violently tribalistic tradition in the provinces insisted that there still might be a man who could utter in behalf of the divine, who could set the world right through ritual bloodshed, who could count as his own strength the intervention of a god worshiped from the days of the father-of-many-nations and still, though silent for some generations, poised to return in glory.

So when Paul, no doubt educated in the texts of Plato and familiar with Athenian skepticism (at the very least familiar with it after he runs into it in Acts 17), subjugates the Romanizing moves of Josephus and the Neoplatonic interpretations of Philo to an apocalyptic vision that holds fast to history, he lays some of the foundations both for the educated critics’ most famous accusations against the Jesus-Jews and for the particular way of life that would become the tradition that claims us.  Certainly Paul calls those early Christians away from the “way of the flesh” in favor of the “way of the Spirit,” but anyone who can read past those phrases quickly discovers that those two phrases name not an embrace and a rejection of human bodies but two radically different ways to live embodied lives together.  As Augustine later writes, expanding on Paul, the life that seeks glory and the life that seeks harmony both necessarily involve bodies, but the difference between power-grabbing bodies and peace-loving bodies is all the difference that human existence can possibly sustain.

Such plays out, of course, in next Sunday’s gospel reading.  Where the glory-seeking Pharisee movement and its Zealot allies expected Messiah to raise up an army as David did, Jesus instead sends out disciples, two by two, without any possessions that an army or even a sensible traveler would need, preferring instead to depend upon those in Israel who can see, by faith, that Messiah brings something quite different from what Rome does, not merely a new boss who’s the same as the old boss.  The God who motivates such things, the ancient God of Abraham and of Elisha, does not fear to bless those who persecute the chosen, to send rain upon the righteous and the wicked alike, knowing because of God’s own might that no force on the earth, not even Death, can hinder Messiah.

May the faithful give thanks for the Kingdom of God and live as the messengers of its gospel.

Our outro music this week comes from Michael Knott’s 1994 record Rocket and a Bomb. The song’s called “Jan the Weatherman.” Hey, “Jan” rhymes with “Dan,” and our special guest this week is tornado chaser Dr. Dan Dawson. He’s kind of a weatherman, anyway.

General Introduction
- Where’s David Grubbs?
- Welcome to our special guest
- What’s on the blog?

Our History with Science
- Dan Dawson dreams of tornadoes
- Michial’s near-failures
- Easy science at Milligan College

Ancient Science
- The four elements
- Aristotle and the geocentric universe
- Methodological contributions
- Rapidly changing science
- A gratuitous shot at 2012

Arab Investigators and Medieval Science
- Why Nathan doesn’t call it science
- Elaborate biology
- Effect on Medieval drama

The Rise of Modern Science
- Reverence for mathematics
- Science as a self-correcting system
- How philosophical is your average scientist?
- “Whatever works”
- No sense of history

Tornadoes
- The Wizard of Oz
- A history lesson
- Electric tornadoes
- How tornadoes work
- But can we fix it?

Mad Scientists and the American Renaissance
- Emerson, Poe, and the War on Science
- Romanticism and the Enlightenment
- Hawthorne and the dangers of scientific perfection
- Melville and the unspeakable
- The death of the imagination

Dan Defends Science
- The move toward the holistic
- A sense of mystery
- The end of history
- The myth of progress

A New Kind of Science
- The ecological movement
- Merging the Romantic and the scientific
- Interdisciplinary interaction

Scientific Threats to Christianity
- Hegel, Nietzsche, Dawkins
- Integration by example, not argument
- Learning from the nü atheists
- Are confessing Christians a lunatic fringe?

The Limits of Science
- Physics and metaphysics
- The limits of theology
- The geocentric universe and evolution
- Non-overlapping magisteria
- The natural shift
- Why we’re frustrated with militant atheism and militant creationism

What We Need to Know
- Science is your ally
- The what questions and the why questions

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. On the Heavens. Trans. J.L. Stocks. Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 447-511.

—. Sense and Sensibilia. Trans. J.I. Beare. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 693-713.

Bacon, Francis. The Major Works. Ed. Brian Vickers. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Signet, 2006.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner, 2008.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Each and All.” Collected Poems and Translations. New York: Library of America, 1994. 9-10.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Birth-Mark.” Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982. 764-780.

—. “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982. 975-1005.

Melville, Herman. “The Lightning-Rod.” Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Tales, Billy Budd. New York: Library of America, 1985.

—. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 1967.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Sonnet—To Science.” Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America, 1984. 38.

Sagan, Carl. Contact. New York: Pocket, 1997.

Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

“God Is Dead” and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself”: Theological Engagements with the New Atheism
Edited by Andrew David, Christopher J. Keller, and Jon Stanley
185 pp. Cascade Books. $23.00

When I saw the title of this book, I was already hooked–although I didn’t consciously make the connection to the Lewis Grizzard book with a similar title, the joke had me hooked before I read even the subtitle.  The book turned out to be even better than the title.

The form of the book grew out of a conversation the editors were having in which they agreed that one of the more offensive things about the Nü Atheism (not their spelling, of course) is that it assumes that questions about God and the gods, inquiries that have inspired centuries of poetry and philosophy and sculpture and other human endeavors, could be dispensed with in the course of a wave of the hand and a three-page syllogism.  Never mind that many of the best-known books in the movement exhibit a profound philosophical illiteracy.  (As Stan Hauerwas, in one of the book’s interviews puts it, “…one of the problems of being a Christian today is that the secular has just become so stupid” (111).)  What rubbed these editors the wrong way is the assumption that all of the depth of human experience basically counted for nothing.  The flatness of the endeavor inspired these editors to put together a collection that exhibits not only a grasp of logic (though it does exhibit that) or a critical acumen (again, check there) but a richness of genre and of approach that shows not only the rigor but the beauty of what lies beyond the myopic scope of the Nü Atheism, and the book that resulted is a compilation of theological essays, conversational interviews, narratives, and poetry whose attention to the flexibility of human existence stands as a reminder of one very important thing that Dawkins and Company neglects.

Also present here is a range of responses not afraid to disagree with one another.  Notably, towards the beginning of the book, Jon Stanley offers a very Brian-McLaren-flavored liberal Protestant response essay, one mostly sympathetic with Derridean atheism as a help for Christians navigating our own historical and conceptual flotsam, and directly afterwards, Ben Suriano responds directly to Stanley with a counter-essay advancing a John-Milbank-influenced critique of Derridean atheism as an extension of modernist-atheist ontologies of violence.  Later on, in the collection’s title essay, Peter Candler offers an array of arguments that situate the appeal of the Nü Atheism more in cultural milieu than in force of argument, and a few artifacts down the table of contents, Randal Rauser (not as a direct response to Candler) argues that the Emergents’ eschewing of logical argument, while understandable as a frustration, nonetheless neglects a significant duty that Christians have to skeptics if we’re to be intellectually hospitable. In this reviewer’s mind, Rauser’s essay on plausibility and rationality is the best straight essay in the collection.

The interviews were perhaps my favorite bits.  In one especially delightful piece theologian Stanley Hauerwas interviews friend and former neighbor (and religious chameleon) Stanley Fish about the Nü Atheism, and part of that exchange is the characteristically offensive Hauerwas line that I quoted above.  In addition to being two of the wittiest human beings that I’m aware of, the duo also explore the nature of theological and philosophical language, the unstated but painfully obvious philosophical assumptions of the Nü Atheists, and the contributions that John Milton and George Herbert make to the ways that English-speakers talk about God.  (What’s not to love?)  In other interviews Charles Taylor talks about the strange tensions he’s experienced in a field that asserts its preference for self-disclosure in its theorists but holds in suspicion those who would self-disclose as Christians, and John Milbank traces modern atheism back to medieval nominalism and holds forth a vision for a Christian globalism that stands in the face of atheistic Capitalist globalism.

I’ve never been a big fan of the personal narrative as theology, but this volume’s stories about interactions with atheists and life in intentional community as a counter to practical atheism did hold my interest, and while I’m partial to Milton and Herbert over postmodern poets, the selections in this book were thought-provoking, even if they’re not Milton.  (But who is?) And as is often the case, it’s the personal essays, the bits that didn’t strike me as the most worthwhile, that keep returning to me as I think on the book.

Overall I delight in noting the success of this experimental project, and I recommend the book strongly to anyone with a philosophical bent who would like to read some intelligent, witty, and sometimes beautiful responses to what Becky Crook, in her personal essay “Mystery and Mayhem,” refers to the culture of “awe-bashing” (158).

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 28 June 2010 (Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14 and Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20 • 1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21 and Psalm 16 • Galatians 5:1, 13-25 • Luke 9:51-62

Once again this week, the lectionary demonstrated to me that, even having taught the Bible for fifteen years, having completed a college minor in Bible and a Master of Arts in Old Testament, and having lived as “the Bible guy” in UGA’s English department for a few years, there are connections that just never occurred to me.  I’ve heard more than one sermon on today’s strange New Testament text, each of them trying to make something of it in isolation but none of them even looking to Elijah and Elisha as precedents.  Taking it as an island, preachers I’ve heard have insisted that the father-to-be-buried wasn’t dead yet (cue Monty Python), that Jesus was making a relativistic argument about holding things like family lightly in light of devotion to God, and other unsatisfying moves, but with 1 Kings in the background, Jesus’ strange sayings about family make some more sense.

When Elisha is following Elijah, the prophetic call is certainly harsh, but the aim is a basic continuity: there is a way of life which YHWH has set out for those descended from the Exodus generation, and those descendants in the day of Ahab are not adhering to it.  As Elisha grows into Elijah’s successor, he prepares to become a voice that calls Israel backwards to the Torah, envisioning a common life without the idols of Tyre and characterized by justice for the weak, but his call remains essential conservative.  When Jesus refuses to allow would-be followers to bid farewell to living and dead family, he signals that whatever he’s doing, it’s going to be novel, something that the world has never imagined before.  (I often bring up Jesus when people quote nihil sub sole novum at me–after all, did not Jesus come after Qoheleth gave us that proverb?)  When Jesus does what Jesus does, the old family lines of Israel will not determine who is Israel and who is not, and when Jesus dies at the hands of Empire and God raises him, funerals will shift so radically in significance that those burying the dead who do not have the hope of resurrection will themselves be as good as dead.  In other words, as I’ve noted before (and as I must attribute to John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas), the call to the plow is not any code of universal ethics, applicable to the generic modern/liberal individual, but a vocation for a chosen people to be a chosen people, to signal to the world through their own demise that death itself has been defeated.  So while calling a man away from his parents’ funeral is certainly a harsh word, it’s certainly no more harsh than the call to follow the crucified one right onto the Roman cross.

Looking at Paul’s fruit of the Spirit in light of this radical call, I realize that whenever I think of love, peace, patience, and kindness as generic Stoic virtue or midwestern “family values,” I miss entirely the strangeness of what Paul was actually calling for.  May the grace of Christ remain always strange to us, even as we attempt to be God’s strangers to the world.

I couldn’t help but thinking of the final climactic action of John Updike’s Couples when I read this story.

Let’s be logically consistent. If Hurricane Katrina and John Piper’s tornado in Minneapolis last year are a warning from God–and I’m not wholly against saying they are–what’s God trying to tell Evangelicals with this one?

How about: Stop making trite representations of the pivotal event in human history?

It is not reasonable to expect everyone to share the same religious views, and since it can be difficult to see God’s hand in our violent and hate-filled universe, I don’t fault anyone for not believing in God. (My own reasons for believing in God are complicated, probably unsatisfying to people who live outside of my body, and a subject for another post.) But there is, best I can tell, a consistent and an inconsistent way to go about being an atheist, and most modern-day atheists fall rather neatly into the latter category. But I’ll let Walker Percy explain. From his novel The Second Coming:

The present-day unbeliever is a greater asshole than the present-day Christian because of the fatuity, blandness, incoherence, fakery, and fat-headedness of his unbelief. He is in fact an insane person. If God does in fact exist, the present-day unbeliever will no doubt be forgiven because of his manifest madness.

The present-day Christian is either half-assed, nominal, lukewarm, hypocritical, sinful, or, if fervent, generally offensive and fanatical. But he is not crazy.

The present-day unbeliever is crazy as well as being an asshole—which is why I say he is a bigger asshole than the Christian because a crazy asshole is worse than a sane asshole.

The present-day unbeliever is crazy because he finds himself born into a world of endless wonders, having no notion how he got here, a world in which he eats, sleeps, shits, fucks, works, grows old, gets sick, and dies, and is quite content to have it so. Not once in his entire life does it cross his mind to say to himself that his situation is preposterous, that an explanation is due him and to demand such an explanation and to refuse to play out another act of the farce until an explanation is forthcoming. . . .

The more intelligent he is, the crazier he is and the bigger an asshole he is. He becomes a professor and forms an interdisciplinary group. He reads Dante for its mythic structure. He joins the A.C.L.U. and concerns himself with the freedom of the individual and does not once exercise his own freedom to inquire into how in God’s name he should find himself in such a ludicrous situation as being born in Brooklyn, living in Manhattan, and being buried in Queens.

Percy, no doubt, won few friends among the atheist community with such statements—though it’s worth pointing out that in the section just before the one I’ve reproduced here, he recites a litany of reasons Christians are nearly as unsatisfactory as atheists, and thus he probably didn’t endear himself to the Religious Right, either. But, vulgarity aside, I think he’s right: Modern atheism, particularly the scientific variety proffered by the Logical Positivists and then by the nü atheists, is unsatisfactory.

The insanity of modern atheism is built on two posts. First, as Percy points out, modern atheism is inherently incurious. The atheist will object here that he has a great respect for the universe, a deep awe at the world around him. This is not what Percy is objecting to; no one claims that the nü atheists explicitly believe themselves to be the all-knowing center of the world, and no one claims that they have absolutely no sense of mystery. The problem is that they seem unwilling to interrogate that which really matters. If God exists, nothing could be more important, but by and large, the modern atheist dismisses God with a wave of his hand. Their sense of wonder is misplaced. They don’t ask the really important questions. Richard Dawkins even suggests that these questions—the “why” questions that are unanswerable by materialist science—are not worth answering. Percy would no doubt cough “asshole” and quickly turn away.

The second post of atheist insanity is the desire to discredit Christianity but to have everyone behave as though Christianity were true. Sartre, of all people, objects to this philosophy:

The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish God with the least possible expense. About 1880, some French teachers tried to set up a secular ethics which went something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis; we are discarding it; but, meanwhile, in order for there to be an ethics, a society, a civilization, it is essential that certain values be taken seriously and that they be considered as having an a priori existence. It must be obligatory, a priori, to be honest, not to lie, not to beat your wife, to have children, etc., etc. So we’re going to try a little device which will make it possible to show that values exist all the same, inscribed in a heaven of ideas, though otherwise God does not exist. In other words . . . nothing will be changed if God does not exist. We shall find ourselves with the same norms of honesty, progress, and humanism, and we shall have made of God an outdated hypothesis which will peacefully die off by itself. (from Existentialism)

The nü atheists have certainly taken up the task begun by these unnamed “French teachers”; I heard a radio interview with Dawkins in which he claimed that Christianity was unnecessary because we could get to its ethical principles without the barbarity of Christ crucified. If this is true, it is only because he lives in a Western world that has for millennia based its ethics on Christ crucified. Confucius may offer us the Golden Rule, but he cannot pray, “Father, forgive them”—and this is, after all, what Dawkins and other purveyors of an atheist ethics desire for all of mankind to say. (What’s all this talk about “compassion” about if not forgiveness?) One cannot discard Christian metaphysics and maintain Christian ethics, at least not in an a priori way; those ethics proceed from the metaphysics, and if you’re going to adopt them, you’d better find a materialist reason for doing so. (Such a reason does not exist, as far as I can tell—you can tell a person that if he beats his wife, society will punish him, but you cannot tell him that spousal abuse is wrong without pointing to a metaphysical standard.)

Sartre will say elsewhere that all of existentialism comes from a saying of Dostoevsky’s (which appears in both The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov): “If there is no God, then all things are permitted.” Dostoevsky’s religious readers sometimes claim that Sartre has gotten Dostoevsky wrong, but if he has, it’s only in assuming (if indeed he does) that Dostoevsky believed there was no God. He certainly did not, and our nü atheists should pay attention to the real consequences of atheism. Ivan Karamazov gleefully proclaims this idea and yet is horrified when his half-brother Smerdyakov kills their father with no remorse. This is the state of man without God—you can intuit ethics, as we all do, but you can’t found them on anything, and you’re left speechless and half-mad if you examine evil seriously. I’ll be dealing with Dostoevsky’s relationship to religious and atheistic existentialism in my next post.

My point here is that the existence or non-existence of God matters, and if Dawkins, et al, take that seriously on the level of social policy, they don’t seem to take it seriously on a personal existential level, which is, of course, the level of real import.

Percy hints at the other inconsistency in nü atheist ethics, but things have progressed a bit since The Second Coming was published in the early ‘80s, and I’ll need to tease this out a little. He speaks disdainfully of the atheist professor who “joins the A.C.L.U. and concerns himself with the freedom of the individual,” but doesn’t get at the real irony in this move. Some—though by no means all—of the nü atheists are committed to a completely materialist vision of what it means to be a human. In other words, any personality, “self,” or “soul” (these last two words are particularly embarrassing to our contemporary atheists, I’ve noticed) is a mere side effect of chemical, physical, and electrical processes in the brain. This viewpoint would suggest that there is, in fact, no mind, only a brain. Professional skeptic Michael Shermer, among others, holds this opinion.

There is no individual, then, at least not in the way Western civilization has held out the notion. And yet the nü atheists are strikingly committed to the notion of human rights, to the point where Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have called for the arrest of Pope Benedict XVI “for crimes against humanity” in his complicity in the recently revealed child-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Shermer is a bit more slippery; on one level he proclaims the relativity of moral values, at least on a social level; on another, he suggests that we should find a natural basis for the ethics of human rights. And why should we, if all our actions are motivated not by a human self but by a collection of human impulse—why should we even seek to find that natural basis for human rights? The answer, of course, is “to make society run smoothly.” But this answer doesn’t suggest human rights; it suggests a fiction to make life more comfortable for certain human beings.

Fictions are fine, but only if one admits them to be fictions instead of claiming them as empirical truths, as Shermer does—or instead of ignoring the issue altogether, as Dawkins seems to. The nü atheists would be well-served by a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, history’s most honest and brilliant atheist thinker, who recognized that without a metaphysical foundation for human society and ethics, the very notion of value would be devalued. The passage that everyone knows from The Gay Science has a madman boldly proclaiming that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” (¶ 125). Less well-known is an earlier passage along the same lines:

New struggles.—After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. –And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. (¶ 108)

Nietzsche would lump religious believers in with those still worshipping the shadow of a dead God, of course; but atheists who treat Christian morality as something separable from Christian metaphysics belong there, too. From Nietzsche’s perspective, after all, they’re hanging on to the pathetic legacy of Christianity.

Indeed, the death of God means the death of morality, meaning, and value itself, and Nietzsche makes the point better than anyone else I’ve ever read:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a person as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins.
(from “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”)

Such are the consequences of a world without God—an atheist who is willing to accept these consequences must either mourn the death of God, as does Sartre, or else glory in the absence of value, as does Nietzsche. The nü atheists, with their satisfied, godless humanism, wish to glory in the death of God and pretend that the values contingent upon the existence of that same God are independent. To quote Nietzsche once more, “They desire the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth; they are indifferent to pure knowledge if it has no consequences.”

Atheistic existentialism, then, is not as hostile to the religious mind as one might suspect, if only because it dares to take religion seriously on its own terms, something that the atheists who subscribe to Logical Positivism (and its contemporary heir, the nü atheism) steadfastly refuse to do.

Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Revised Common Lectionary Page for 20 June 2010 (Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

1 Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a and Psalm 42 and 43 • Isaiah 65:1-9 and Psalm 22:19-28 • Galatians 3:23-29 • Luke 8:26-39

One could certainly blame Paul for modern Christians’ romanticized take on Abraham.  For that matter, Paul seems to have fed us Abraham and Moses and David in forms that ignore the ugly particulars that the Old Testament will not turn loose of; Abraham, instead of being a man so amoral as to pimp his wife in fear, gets reduced to the moment when he sets forth from Ur.  Moses, the one who murders three thousand of his kinsmen just after convincing YHWH not to massacre the lot of them, is identified with the divine law.  And David, who puts on the greatest show of piety on earth until the moment after his son dies, then wants something to eat and to get laid, is the “man after God’s own heart.”  There’s something to Paul’s tendency to treat these rich characters as one-line icons, but for someone like me who considers the Old Testament both sacred and literature, he’s sometimes hard to swallow.

When Elijah tells YHWH that when Jezebel gets ahold of him he’ll be no better than his ancestors, I don’t think that the text on its surface is doing much more than being euphemistic about Elijah’s fear of death.  (After all, ancestors become ancestors only when they stop breathing.)  But I do wonder about the possibilities that running with the phrase might bring: if he continues on the run, exiled from Samaria, he might still be alive, but he’ll be no better than his ancestor Abraham, whose desperation reveals his real cowardice.  If he runs into the people still oppressed under Ahab and Jezebel, he might turn out no better than the vigilante Moses, who murders an Egyptian guard in cold blood, then becomes an object of scorn and fear to his own people.  And if he gets the notion to resist Ahab, he’ll have to recruit foreign mercenaries to do so, making him no better than his ancestor David, who leads an army of Hittites and Amorites in a civil war against the people of Israel when Absalom usurps the throne.

Such is the way of the historically-contingent people of God, and that’s one of the many reasons why Jesus is so important in moments of existential crisis.  When he encounters a man possessed by “Legion,” Luke plays coy by noting that the name has something to do with a plurality of spirits, but folks familiar with the story of occupied Palestine know full well what the Roman “Legions” were to the embattled people: they brought out of Israel all of those sinful tendencies that Jesus and Paul decry, not removing responsibility for their nationalism and sectarianism and abandonment of Abraham’s call to bless the nations but certainly exacerbating those worthless tendencies.  When Jesus confronts not men with swords but unclean spirits called Legion, and when he drives them into the livestock that most readily symbolizes what’s happened to God’s promised land and chosen people, he reminds those present and those reading that the particularity of the Jews has not gone away, that even as Peter’s vision in Acts 10 radicalizes the vision of what Israel will become in the age of the Messiah, what emerges in the new age is still Israel.  God has not forgotten.

So in some sense, even as one who ascended into Heaven without tasting death (along with Enoch and, if one allows for miracles after the closing of the canon, Mary), Elijah turns out as one who is no better than his ancestors: even as he speaks on behalf of YHWH, he awaits the same YHWH’s chosen king to arrive, to bring all nations (including the sinful critters who are supposed to be blessing the nations, not sacrificing to Ba’al) the blessings of God’s kindness.  In one sense we Christians certainly live in a different age, proclaiming as we do that the dead-and-raised-and-ascended Jesus of Nazareth is and always will be that king, but on another level we share with Elijah that fundamental anxiety, that the still, small voice (I still prefer to the KJV locution) might not this time rescue us from that which would destroy.

May we proceed, until the day when faith and hope give way to the consummation of love, with the boldness of our ancestors, reaching for the icon even as we live more like the story.

Jesus Manifesto: Restoring the Supremacy and Sovereignty of Jesus Christ
By Len Sweet and Frank Viola
201 pp. Thomas Nelson. $14.99

I sometimes wish that I’d gone into theology for my Ph.D work, but that does not mean that I think that theology is easy intellectually.  On the contrary, like literary studies, theology requires a degree of discipline and acumen to which I certainly aspire but cannot at any given moment claim as mine.  I’m not one of those folks who makes the (strange) claim that only theology books older than the American republic are worth reading; there are very good books of theology even from the last fifty years, and certainly I would not be the thinker and teacher that I am without the influences of folks like David Bosch, Walter Brueggemann, Stanley Hauerwas, Elizabeth Johnson, John Milbank, Richard Hays, N.T. Wright, and John Howard Yoder.  In fact, the presence of those folks on my own intellectual horizons reminds me that good theology writing is not only possible but very edifying to Christians devoted to thinking, and I appreciate them all the more after I’ve read a book like Jesus Manifesto. Len Sweet’s and Frank Viola’s book does not start out with bad intentions; it just proves inadequate to the task, not a crime but also not a commendation.

The Jesus Manifesto (hereafter JM) asserts that most of modern Christianity (though their critiques tend to focus fairly single-mindedly on American evangelicalism) has displaced Christ as the center of Christian life, preferring (at various turns) self-help (100), politics (106), cuteness (75), political correctness(93), philosophy (xxii), imitation of Christ (68), and justice (113).  The problem is that, as far as I could tell, the book never offers a working idea of what the word “Christ” means that it doesn’t later negate.  In other words, many passages in the book offer sentimentalist versions of Christ, the object of aesthetic gaze that will elevate the soul because of the interior excitement that results.  But then there are other passages that decry sentimentalism.  There are passages that hold out Christ as the true and genuine king in a world of would-be powers.  But then other passages say that Jesus does not have any real politics, that a right-wing Capitalist and a social-justice advocate can equally serve Jesus.  There are passages that place the Church at the heart of the identity of Christ, but then others say that any “religion” is simply a replacement for the real Christ whose claim is on the individual person’s soul.  And so on.

One early problem with this book (a problem common to many popular press Christian books, if my own experiences participate in a trend) is that it attempts to establish itself as too distinct from too many things, some of which are simply part of writing a theology book.  One section heading, just to start with an anecdote, is “Introducing a Jesus Most of Us Have Never Imagined” (27).  (This Jesus, for those who will not read the book, is the Jesus of Colossians, a text widely available if any text is widely available.)  At any rate, the book’s fast-paced style leads far too often to carelessness with subjects that deserve at the very least some serious and humble attention.  JM’s introduction claims that “Christianity is not an ideology or a philosophy” (xxii), but then the following two paragraphs make (as I count them) three philosophical claims in describing what Christianity is.  Likewise, after declaiming theology as one idol among many that distracts from Christ, JM assumes a whole boatload of Anselmian and Augustinian theology as it makes a sales pitch for the “real” (in this case sentimentalist) Christ (32-34).  JM dismisses grand ideas and debates with a wave of its hand, relegating free will and predestination to a simple misunderstanding (163), making Pharisees whatever it wants to make them with no engagement with historical scholarship (131), claiming (again, strangely) that Jesus’ brotherhood with believers is “not some metaphor” (142–call Dan Brown, stat!), and entirely ignoring Daniel 7 and asserting that all mentions of “Son of Man” in the gospels refer to generic mortality and nothing else (166).

Such is a sampling of the strange moves the book makes; in other places it directly contradicts itself, one chapter seemingly unaware of another.  Jesus is not the Liberator that the Liberation theologians want to hold up (110), but Jesus is the Liberator (152).  A strong concern with justice makes one functionally equivalent to George W. Bush (111) and with Iranian Shi’ite clerics (112), but justice is ultimately one of Jesus’ own strongest concerns (115).  Jesus is not at all concerned with politics (118) but establishes a definite politics (119) but is not concerned with politics (120).  The contradictions certainly do point to difficult bits of theology, and theologians over the centuries have written interesting and important treatises and dialogues and sermons dealing with those difficult bits.  But JM seems almost entirely unconcerned with tapping into those traditions, nodding here and there to a line from a theologian that supports what point this or that chapter is already trying to make but giving little sense that that entire project is part of that grand Christian conversation (a conversation, after all, that the book wants to distance itself from as minimizing Christ).

In addition to the contradictions JM presents raw assertion where the moment calls for research.  (Frank Viola recently co-authored a book with George Barna; I wonder why he didn’t tap his recent colleague for some statistics in these places.)  In an early chapters JM’s authors claim to have met “countless ‘Bible-believing Christians’” who think that Jesus is an early hurdle to be surmounted on the way to bigger and better things (23).  Viola relates a story of one person who was impressed with a talk he gave at a conference and extrapolates that nobody in Christendom must be privy to the Spirit in the way that JM makes possible (101).  The eighth chapter begins with the phrase “Virtually every sermon preached today” (123) with no citations indicating that anybody has attempted to study “virtually every sermon preached today.”  (Again, one wonders where George Barna was when they needed him.)  Later in that chapter JM makes reference to “many sermons we hear preached today” (126) but no examples of those sermons.  Now a theology book does not need statistics to make its claim, but a theology book that claims to be responding to trends in Christianity at large probably ought to demonstrate some familiarity with Christianity at large rather than “I know a guy” stories.

The roots of JM’s problems lay in its insistence that so many theological tensions are not complex relationships between interpretations and implications but rather simple zero-sum games.  One can teach on “how to live by faith” or teach Christ, but not both (13).  One can learn theology or worship Christ, but not both (19).  One can combat heresy or worship Christ, but not both (25).  One can strive to imitate Christ or invite Christ to indwell one’s person, but not both (68–I wonder how recently the authors have perused Philippians).  One can be interested in “causes” or worship Christ, but not both (101).  Now few thoughtful people would deny that excessive focus on any of these things could render one’s Christianity a pious veneer over a logically prior ideology, but JM offers few real guidelines for discerning when such concerns become excessive or prior, and as I noted above, in other places it simply contradicts itself.  Such faults certainly reinforce that doing theology well can be a difficult enterprise, and they should point the thoughtful reader to folks like Milbank and Hauerwas (or fill in your favorite theologian here) who have attempted to articulate the complexity of such relationships, but this book in itself will not do much to lead a reader to more adequate thinking about such things.

Perhaps one could object that not every human being needs to be an academic theologian.  I would agree, and I would add that not every human being needs to be publishing theology books.  Sweet and Viola no doubt are crowd-pleasing public speakers, and their flair for clever phrases would no doubt make for a lucrative business designing T-shirts:

• At the heart of orthodoxy is paradoxy. (66)
• Grace gives us what we do not deserve; mercy delivers us from what we do deserve. (115)
• The “Christian life” is impossible.  It’s only Him-possible. (127)
• We live in a day when what sells best in the Christian world are books, sermons, and television programs [...] orbiting around the Youniverse. (166)
• He is a savior to the uttermost for our “guttermost.” (167)

In addition to these phrases the book fairly frequently wanders off into seemingly unrelated riffs, be those riffs about the remoteness and insignificance of Nazareth (72) or John Milton (99).  There’s nothing wrong with any of these moves; in other contexts, they might serve as thought-provoking reminders of larger arguments or sermons.  But appearing as they do in a mass-market Christian book, they do not remind readers of but substitute for careful argument and thought, and although they might be crowd-pleasers, they do little to advance any particular point.  I have to wonder as I think about this book if its publication in its present form is a symptom of inadequate thought about audience and genre, two things that I think about a great deal as a writing teacher but that likely get minimized in the lives of traveling conference speakers.

One disturbing moment that deserves some comment compares the deaths of Archbishop Oscar Romero with the death of Roger Schutz, who founded the Taize community, and it exemplifies an underlying preference for the political and economic status quo that pervades the book.  The brief passage (another riff, really), reads thus:

This culture loves causes, and it lionizes those who died fighting them.  There is nothing wrong with causes.  Archbiship Oscar Romero took up the cause of victims displaced in the Salvadoran civil war, and was assassinated during his homily as he was giving mass in 1980.  Now “San Romero,” as he is often called, is one of only ten twentieth-century martyrs honored above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey of London.  On the other hand, Brother Roger Schutz, founder of Taize, was killed on August 16, 2005, not for a cause he was promoting, but because of who he was, a follower of Jesus. (94)

As far as I could tell in some quick research, the most anyone would say about Roger Schutz’s murderer was that she was “mentally ill.”  The point here is not to open that investigation again but to note that, for JM, Romero’s death was not “for Christ” because his was more an assassination than a murder, much less a senseless murder.  That Romero was serving Christ in the persons of the poor is hard to dispute, and that martyrs become martyrs not because they die senselessly but because the enemies of Christ kill them is a basic bit of Church history.  But in their quest not to identify themselves with any “cause,” they choose the senseless killing to hold up and relegate Romero to the ranks of “defenders of causes.”

On one level this fear of “politics” (though, as I noted above, it’s a fear of politics that they can’t even sustain for a full page in some places) is understandable: if the goal is to unite Christians under Christ, then either the Capitalists or the supporters of Romero are going to have to budge, and given that neither group is prone to budging, the temptation is there to do an end-run around the question altogether.  But given that their targets in the “politics” sections are consistently those who advocate for the poor over against Capitalism, it’s not hard to see where they’d prefer to throw their Caesar-allegiance when the chips are down.

JM is not a total loss; when the authors do slow down, they do point in helpful directions, most notably in their section on ecclesiology (in which they acknowledge, briefly, that they’re advancing ideas first articulated by Yoder and Hauerwas).  Moreover, as I noted, it can serve as a helpful case study in the intellectual obstacles and tensions lie in the path of one who would think carefully about Christ and living as Christ’s body in a world that does not hail Christ as Lord.  But in most people’s cases, cases in which money is not infinite and shelf space has limits, I’d recommend starting not with this volume but with something that goes about the difficult work of theology more carefully.

Our blog and podcast seem to attract readers and listeners from all over the theological and political spectrum, so I’m very interested in the results of this survey, from Brett McCracken, author of a forthcoming book on the subject: Are You a Christian Hipster?

Post your score in the comments section, reader (and other writers). I got a 74/120, which makes me feel cool but not “hip.” Thank God.