How to be an atheist: A lesson in Muscularity

I begin this post with an excerpt from an essay in Denys Turner's excellent book 'Faith Seeking', which occurs at the conclusion of the Yale philosopher-theologian's challenge to contemporary atheists. Turner writes as follows right at the conclusion of his discussion:

'So, 'How to be an atheist?' It is not easy; you need to work at it. Be intellectually adult, get an education, get yourself a discipline; resist all temptation to ask such questions as you do not know in principle can be answered, being careful to suppress any which might seem to push thought off civilized limits; be reasonable, lest you find yourself being committed to an excessive rationality; and have the good manners to scratch no itches which occur in intellectually embarassing places - at least in public...if you want to be an atheist, then, it is necessary only to find that the world is to be a platitudinously dull fact. But, I warn you, to be as resolute as it takes in the conviction of such cosmic dullness requires much hard work, not a little training, and a powerful mental asceticism. Anything less resolute, and you run the risk of affliction by theological itches...' [Faith Seeking, p.22]

Perhaps the thing I like most about this description is its stern focus on the drab conformity of much atheism, which consists in its sweeping under the proverbial carpet of life's big questions. The image which comes most readily to my mind in this context is the desire of Adam and Eve to 'hide' from God in the garden of Eden, post fruit taking, a desire which - Paul assures us (1 Cor. 15:22) - leads only to death. In Christ, meanwhile, hiding is unnecessary. Being made alive involves coming out into the open; it involves countering and reacting against the drab conformity which life in hiding demands.

However, when light comes into the world, to evoke an image from John's Gospel, some people prefer to stay in the darkness. The darkness is comfort in numbers, the realm of uncontroversy and macho back slapping; the darkness is a world in which deaths are plotted, and where the demise of the wilfully unrecognised light is hoped for. The darkness refuses to stretch out its arms to its deliverer and instead reaches to its own deliverance, which it finds confirmed in others doing the same thing. Johannine imagery, for all its worth here, only takes us so far.

What Turner's comment invites us to understand is that 'atheism' - conceived in its opposition to Christian faith - thrives in its contemporary forms on being 'civilized', staying 'rational', and refusing to move into 'uncivilized' or 'irrational' circles or trains of thoughts. The complaint owes its urgency, I think, not only to the author's Marxist sympathies. It also comes out of a genuine understanding of how the Pharisaic legalism which the Gospels can so strongly protest against can work. Not, you will understand, that I think Jesus was 'out to get' the Pharisees or to rebel against 'Pharisaism' per se: it is more likely, certainly, that he saw in Pharisaism much that was worthy of admiration, much to be commended - but also the potential for abuse, serious abuse - and this was something, I think, which certain Pharisees were themselves not particularly given to seeing. In a way, Pharisaism in its negative guises (the guises which Jesus protested against) and Atheism (that is, Muscular, Legalistic, Atheism with a capital A) are natural bedfellows.

They both start from principles of order and rationality, on the need for being civilized. And they take strong exception to acts of dissidence or words of complaint against them. And if we return to Denys Turner's words, they both require a stringent intellectual regime to support them, in which asking certain questions is ruled out de rigueur - on the basis of some unstated, hidden, a priori reasoning. Christian faith, and Christian lives, are best realised very often as acts of dissidence, as sustained attempts to break through barriers of order and rationality which are constructed in the name of reason, order and being civilized. Love, and loving behaviour cannot be relied upon to conform to these expectations; the holy spirit, the spirit of love, is too unbridled for the harness of pure reason, pure order, pure civilization, as they are conceived by Muscular Atheists. For their constructions - made apart from a political stance which finds its origin in the desire for love of God and neighbour (does love consist above all in its rationality??) - miss the mark very profoundly. And this is so even while the most collegiate support for the atheist worldview is available among friendly peers who would also sweep a certain kind of question under the carpet as part of the intellectual training in rationality and being civilized which Good Atheist Thought relies upon.

As for Christianity, meanwhile, the only wisdom, the only reason, consists in the love of God and of neighbour (which is like it). And here, a point which many Christians themselves miss needs to be made: to love as Christ demands is not to sit cosily in intellectual communion, with regimes of reason and order comfortably in place. For that is what the Pharisees and the Atheists do. To love is to believe, to be Christlike, and to pick up our crosses and follow: to love is to do what is right and to feel and think it throught doing it. And doing means challenging, overturning, reinventing, creating. This means, very often, doing what the legalists would have you not do: it involves overthrowing their tables, cracking the intellectual whip and breaking down the barriers of order and reason which they construct to maintain their communities of cosy control and peer support. God's love seeks people out: it won't let them hide. It's a lesson many Christians - myself included - need constantly to remind ourselves of.

Aelred of Rievaulx on Friendship

Spiritual Friendship by Aelred of Rievaulx, the 12th century Christian mystic who lived as a Cistercian monk in Yorkshire, is a beautiful and well known tract which is well worth a read. It certainly qualifies, I think, as a 'classic' of Christian spirituality. I'm about half way through it (the book takes a dialogue form - in style it is in this respect not dissimilar to Plato - and the Aelred character is the centrepiece and a compelling discussant). I reproduce here one of my favourite lines from the text, where Aelred asks his discussant Ivo the following:

'Have you forgotten that Scripture says: 'He that is a friend loves at all times' (Prov. 17:17). Our [St.] Jerome also, as you recall, says: 'Friendship which can end was never true friendship' (Jerome, Letter 3.6 in Patrologia Latina 22:335). That friendship cannot endure without charity having been more than adequately established. Since then in friendship eternity blossoms, truth shines forth, and charity grows sweet, consider whether you ought to separate the name of wisdom from these three'.

The striking thing about the text is the essential link it insists upon between eternity and friendship, and with truth and charity, and finally with wisdom. All this links beautifully with at least two crucial biblical motifs: God as love/charity (1 Jn. 4:16) and Christ as truth (Jn. 14:6). And the link between wisdom and the presence of Christ (so e.g. Col. 3:16) is also clearly in view. It's a clarion call to remember that true love inextricably reflects and exists in the truth and love of God in Jesus Christ. Aelred, to repeat, is well worth a read.

Prayer in the Daily Mail

Today's Daily Mail ran with a story about how a hospital nurse who asked an elderly hospital patient if she wanted her to pray for her has been suspended from work and faces the sack. Read more here.

There's a lesson to be learned from this story, although it's certainly not the lesson which the Daily Mail journalists were trying to sell. What they have to say we've heard a thousand times before. Woe is Britain; cherished traditions are falling away; Christianity is persecuted; political correctness runs wild. No, these perennial Daily Mail subjects are not the ones I want to talk about here. What's more interesting is to look at what they're actually trying to defend - whether they know it or not - in this specific instance.

To judge from the information contained in the article, the nurse in question had "asked" her patient if she wanted her to pray for her. Now that's important. I very much doubt any of the health officials the article mentions would have had a problem if the nurse had tottered into a quiet corner to say a few words of prayer on her behalf without asking. Then there's the underlying implication which attaches to the fact that she asked if she would like to be prayed for. Was permission needed? If not, what was the point in asking? The answer to this question takes in a number of issues and relates above all to the form of Christianity which the nurse was giving expression to.

Of course, the whole exchange has all the hallmarks of Biblicist evangelicalism (the article stiplulates that the nurse is a worshipper in just such a tradition, a 'Baptist' one). In this tradition, people can and should be put on the spot and asked difficult questions; not only that, but people are asked if there's anything they should or might like to have prayed for on their behalf. In itself, this way of doing things no doubt irritates some people (though not the woman concerned in this instance) but is not really particularly harmful.

But what if someone is lying on their deathbed and you are from a tradition which believes that people who don't 'follow Christ' (in the way you see fit) will be damned. Then the 'prayer' question can represent a whole different agenda. The underlying implication is 'I'll let you know that I'd like to pray for you right now, because if you don't submit to Christ pretty soon, you'll be stewing with Satan before too long: prayer, therefore, is the least I can do'. If that was anything like the impression left by the nurse on the woman she was dealing with, or with anyone else for that matter, it would be no surprise whatsoever if complaints were made.

A final point is worth mentioning here and it relates to the ethics, not to mention the eticet, of prayer. Prayer can and should happen whateverthe people being prayed for think about it. They don't have to know about it. To pray for someone, I don't, and should never, need a permission slip. In this respect, prayer is like forgiveness. It should be done whether my adversary forgives ME or not. Or like love. I must love my enemies whether they love me or not.

The person who asks someone permission to pray for them is not listening hard enough either to God or to their neighbour. 'Would you like me to pray for you?' is not a question any Christian should ever have to ask. They should be praying for the person concerned anyway. Underlying their prayers should be the belief that deep down, in the heart of hearts of the person they are praying for - however far from God they might seem, that person WANTS to be prayed for. Now that's far more non-PC. Questions of this sort, of course, are - alas - not the Daily Mail's strong suit.

Evangelical Theology: Some Quibbles

I record here some issues I recently covered in discussion with an evangelical Christian regarding three important areas of theological interest: a) the question of self love and human sinfulness, b) thinking about the devil/evil, and c) death and atonement.

a) (An) 'evangelical' position: "Sin is any behavior that is done out of self-importance and self-love. We were created to love and glorify God and we owe the same love to his creations, our fellow men, but we sin in making ourselves the object of our love and glorification and in justifying our actions by those terms."

Response:
I think this profoundly misses the point. Look again at Lev. 19:18. 'Love your neighbour AS YOURSELF'. The implication being, of course, that we are naturally self loving. This is not condemned by Jesus - although it's a matter of some controversy in Augustine who (interestingly) you go on to mention in your next sentence (cf. O. O'Donovan, The problem of Self Love in St. Augustine). Anyway, the point is that we ARE the object of our love (like it or not), although not necessarily of our 'glorification' (an entirely different matter altogether). Self love isn't sinful. The wrong kind(s) of self love are sinful,as are the wrong kinds of God-love and neighbour-love.

b) (An) 'evangelical' position: "We must be wary of saying anything about Satan that isn't in the bible. Satan is not explicitly described as a fallen angel and ruler of a demonic realm called Hell, this comes mostly from Milton and worldly church traditions."

Response:
The Bible is of course the vital source for our Christian thinking. As far as I'm concerned, I have to be wary about how I think/talk about the devil with respect to more authorities than the Bible, however. I'm wary of what the Bible says, what tradition has maintained in different ecclesial contexts, what my faculties of reason tell me, and what my experience of worship and prayer reveals to me. This, by the way, is known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. If church traditions/reason/experience illumine the Bible in ways that shed true light on the text (even if this means the original biblical author wouldn't have thought/been able to think in precisely the terms in question), then I feel under the obligation of the holy spirit to make sense of the text/God's revelation with respect to them. Moreover, upon what criterion are we to know a 'worldly' church tradition from an 'unworldly' one? Aaaargh, let's not open the hermeneutical can of worms: so much is written about that and I think all parties concerned would be better off reading more elsewhere. Suffice to say it's a gloriously provocative idea that one can in any way determine what is 'worldly' and what isn't. It was upon precisely this issue that we confront the most basic challenge of Jesus to those he offended! They presumed to know what 'unworldly' (i.e. Godly) holiness was - and he (the Messiah!) didn't fit the bill. We should be extra careful, then, if we want to go down anything like the same road without an overriding sense of our human proclivities to get things profoundly wrong (as they did). To answer the question more directly, it shouldn't matter a jot that Milton imagined hell and Satan in different and more developed ways than did the biblical authors. He also thought in English. The point, in each case, is that we must judge what he has to say for its theological penetration and truthfulness: for this, we need not require his worldview to correspond exactly with that of the biblical authors. The holy spirit didn't just stop work after the biblical canon was compiled. The spirit of truth and understanding still serves to build up knowledge in the community of believers, whether in Milton or whoever else. We can't rule him out of court on principle.

c) (An) 'evangelical' position: "All throughout the bible, God makes abundantly clear that death is necessary for atonement of the inequities of sin".

Response: Look again at John 8 (Jesus' intervention to prevent the 'just' stoning of the adulteress). It's death to sin that God wants, not physical death (!). Jesus' death is necessary only because of his and the father's love (Jn. 15), not because of 'inequities', and this love extends to the lost, the outcast, and to those we consider 'enemies'. By conquering the devil in his death and resurrection, he made us 'dead to sin' so that we might 'live unto righteousness' (1. Pet. 2:24). This is true of ALL of us, Christians or not: God's love - and Christ's love - knows no limits. We can know this only if we accept the love which has been made manifest and open our hearts and 'doors' to the gift of the spirit (Rev. 3).

I accept that the sacrificial imagery of Hebrews presents a different picture. But the Bible has never spoken with just one voice and there has never been total agreement amongst Christians about exactly what Jesus' life and death 'meant'. The witness of Hebrews merely reflects this fact and I see no reason to be worried about allying oneself with other schools of interpretation if their witness appears, under the guidance of the spirit, to be more true. Jesus himself, after all, carved his own particular path through the midrashic quagmire of Torah interpretation by rejecting or suppressing some ideas and accepting or prioritising others. We must do the same.

Loshon Hora

Idle gossip, which may be true enough, but which has no concern for the wider good of the party being discussed, is rightly warned against by Torah-observant Jews. They call it Loshon Hora. That the ancient rabbis derived the prohibition from Lev. 19:16, a passage which directly precedes the love command - 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' - of Lev. 19:18 makes it doubly interesting. I have little doubt that the love command was taken by ancient Jews - and early Christians - to lie in a significant way in the avoidance of Loshon Hora. St. Paul's excursus on love in 1 Cor. 13 is surely informed by his own awareness of this link: indeed, the following verses seem a pointed recognition of it...

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1. Cor. 13:4-7).

The good Christian knows that Loshon Hora is unacceptable. He may learn from his Jewish friends to give it its name, to espy opposition to it being worked out in his scriptures - written as they were by Jews - and to acknowledge the point of overlap between the two traditions, both of which seek to uphold the command to love which both regard as the highpoint of the law. Avoidance of unnecessarily speaking evil about others is essential to the keeping of the commandment to love. Jews and Christians agree on this point.

A Sermon I gave [4]

If we accept that to be human is, whether we like it or not, to have ‘gods’ – whether they are microscopes or electrons or chromosomes, as in the case of the scientistic fundamentalists I have been describing – or football players, popstars or film actors, as in the case of many of the rest of us, it’s worth entering seriously into the business of thinking about the kind of God or gods we in our heart of hearts really want to have. And here, I think, the Christian Gospel offers us some vital insights. Crucially, it insists that the thing about most so-called gods is that they are dead. Not dead in some bare physical sense: David Beckham is very much alive and well, of course, as are many of the other gods of stage and screen whose lives we are tempted to mould ours around, both in terms of the money we apportion to them and in terms of our efforts to look and be more like them. But they are certainly dead nonetheless, and it is important to appreciate how this is so. They are dead, I think, because what they offer to their devotees is so often offered only in exchange for some reward: it is a form of pay packet, in other words, or some other form of gratification for an ailing sense of self esteem.

The radical thing about the Christian God is that he is not motivated by these things – he doesn’t need a paypacket and his self-esteem does not need to be bolstered. And gods who need paypackets or bolstered self esteem aren’t, I would suggest, in spite of appearances, particularly powerful or even interesting gods. It’s not that such gods are wholly bad or evil or conceited: that’s not it. It’s just that what they really are is human, all too human, just like us: which, to be clear, is not to say wholly bad or evil or conceited but just enough of each to make worshipping them a morally dubious activity, curiously similar in character, I would wager, to worshipping oneself or one’s own sense of ‘Reasoning’. And even if these ‘human’ gods can be very good at singing a song or bending a football over a wall, they’re still not – in the big scheme of things – worth climbing trees to see.

For they would let you look at them for a while but sooner or later would demand a pay packet or some words of eulogy to enhance their deficient senses of self esteem. They might, it is true, tell you that you’re worth a million dollars and that you ought to think more of yourself – even deserve to do so – just like they think they do; I’m thinking here of the Gok Wans and Trinny and Susannahs of this world – people who despite the best assurances and their brash and confident public exteriors nonetheless exude – at least in the eyes of the more perceptive media commentators – a real and nagging lack of self esteem. If some of us find ourselves being taken on board by the message of self fulfilment and self realisation of a Gok or a Trinny, do we really find the gospel they offer, upon reflection, a satisfactory one?

Would Trinny advise us to hold off on the expensive hand bags and necklaces and embrace us in a new light for having sold half our goods to the poor, as Jesus does in the story of Zacchaeus? Would Gok advise us to seek out the needy – as opposed to the local John Lewis – in our search for a renewed sense of life’s meaning?

Even if Gok and Trinny profess to care about the decisions we might make in the absence of their involvement (and here, I think, we can reasonably doubt their sincerity), there is no reason to suppose that the decision to do things such as these – which play no discernible part in their self improving teachings – would be regarded as anything other than at best strange, at worst stupid. For Trinny and Gok, giving your money and attention to them and to designer shoemakers and store managers, rather than to the poor, the outcast, the sick and the spiritually weak and vulnerable is how best to reach a satisfactory sense of self love.

The gospel these celebrity gods most usually preach is the Gospel of the cultivation of self, without reference to or emphasis on the importance of the cultivation of others. That this gospel stands in ideological contradistinction to the Christian gospel is so obvious as to be hardly worth saying. But it can nonetheless never be said enough that the Christian gospel’s leading idea is that the most pressing concern of humans is the love of God and the love of neighbour. And the love of self, insofar as it is important, is important only insofar as these other loves are in view. The kind of self love, then, which separates itself off from the business of loving God and of loving one’s neighbour on this view radically misses the mark. As, for that matter, does the kind of neighbour love which separates itself off from the business of loving God. For it is only through attempting to love our neighbours and attempting to love God at the same time in our innermost being that we can experience the love of God for us.

The God of Jesus Christ exemplifies this divine love, which takes the form of the gift of salvation to those who don’t have it. This gift is not an empty one: it is above all a gift of freedom from dead gods and an introduction to life with a living one through his forgiveness and our repentance, and the interchange of these in the life of the church. God’s gift is an invitation to experience and participate in a creative energy which works remorselessly and creatively in and through people – not for its own gain, but gratuitously, for their sake. It can be a guide as we proceed in the difficult, challenging and uncomfortable directions it leads us in, directions which defy even our most earnest attempts to impose regimes of ‘order’ on what is going on. And in the context of the gratuitous relationships which it opens up, we begin to discover that we are known and loved in ways we previously had not thought to know and love ourselves. For God comes to our houses while we are tax collectors and sinners, before we have begun to understand what his love is really like and before we have begun our attempts to exemplify it in our lives.

And as the third chapter of the book of Revelation, my other text this evening, asserts in the plainest possible terms, when he comes to our houses, God says: ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me’. As for dead gods, they don’t knock. They are themselves, like us, the unwilling subjects of this true God’s saving action: for like us, they are unwilling to open the door to let in true love, as opposed to the merely self gratifying and misguided love which they can find already inside their houses. The tragic pedicament of these gods is that they and their followers have not yet found outside the love and life which Zacchaeus, the tax collector who wanted to see and know the truth and who climbed his tree and opened his door, found there.
Amen.