Our August Myths: The Legitimacy of Theology in a Secular Age (Part B)
A Secular Age [Part A]
Even under
the ever-graying October sky, Britain’s bright red-orange buses draw little
attention to themselves amidst the daily bustle. Just one more noise, one more color, in the
city kaleidoscope. On January 6th,
2009, however, for a brief while, everything changed. Suddenly, the buses in Britain found
themselves chauffeur to a curious advertisement: “There’s Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying, And Enjoy Your Life.” The
ad campaign, the brainchild of writer Ariane Sherine, was a result of her
ever-increasing agitation at a Christian group (JesusSaid.org) whose
Fundamentalist vocality regarding the fact that all non-Christians will burn in
hell forever, is equaled only—and this is pure conjecture of course—by what we
could presume would be their related conviction that Webster’s Dictionary change
the boring old normal sense of “Good
News.” In the newspaper The Guardian, Sherine put out a plea to
her fellow atheists to fund a nonviolent evangelistic campaign for
atheism. Their response in essence was
“Please, take all my money.” Backed by
several famous Atheists, most notably Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling, when
the donation window closed on October 24th 2008 after only a few
days, the total stood at a whopping £153,523.51 (I did the math: given the
rate of conversion in October of 2008, this equaled $257,428.22). Even a
Christian, Paul Woolley, director of a Christian think-tank called Theos, and a close associate of the former Archbishop Rowan Williams,
donated £50,
saying it was “a great way to get people to start thinking about God.” Though this was a bit more roundabout than
the methods we normally think of in typical evangelism, he was probably right.[i]
In many ways the explicitness of
this campaign is unsurprising, and an action of this sort should have been
expected sooner or later. We live in an
era of atheism (what Walter Kasper calls “the atheism of the masses”)[ii]
whose level of popular appeal is completely without precedent in history. It seems inevitable that atheism would not
just remain an intellectual opponent of faith, but transmute into a
counter-evangelistic enterprise—for the idea of God (or no-God) has immediate
and radical consequences for life, surely? Therefore it must be dealt with
according to its high level ramifications.
It is difficult, for example, to open recent theology books without
their doctrines of God being at least partially shaped by their interaction
with and response to atheism.[iii] Some adopt the basic position of skepticism
so as to work through it. Thus Kasper
again: “In this secularized world God becomes increasingly superfluous as a
hypothesis…We must live in the world ‘as if there were no God.’… The question
before us is: given the situation, how are we to speak intelligibly of God?”[iv]
(note the affinity with our paper’s theme).
Or take Philip Clayton who puts it quite bluntly in the opening to his
book (itself tellingly titled) The
Problem of God in Modern Thought: “Not to put too fine a point on it: the
context for treating the question of God today must be skepticism.”[v] Others, like G.K. Chesterton boldly (and
Chesterton was never anything but bold!) acknowledge some of the legitimate
claims of atheism but assert that atheism is a genuine moment—but only a
moment—within Christian theology itself: “let the revolutionists choose…a god
from among the gods…they will not themselves find another God who has himself
been in revolt…(The matter grows too difficult for human speech)…let the
atheists choose a god. They will only
find one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which
God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”[vi] Here we indeed see initial hints at least:
atheism and theism are metaphysically costly positions worth critically
engaging, or so the usual course of argument goes. But the bus campaign speaks of something
else, something deeper that has erupted, namely: paradoxically, a critical indifference between belief and
unbelief.
As Marshall McLuhan was so famous
for saying: “the medium is the message,” and here the medium, of course, is a
bus ad. Buses which, as we described in
the beginning, are often so innocuous as to pass by, hardly noticed in our day
to day life, soon to be out of sight and forgotten. This, oddly enough, blends quite well with
the peculiar content of the ad
message: “There is probably no God. Now
stop worrying and enjoy life.” Certainly
some may have been walking around town worrying about God, secretly hoping
against hope a bus ad would unfetter them of their metaphysical burden,
allowing them to just get on with life; but by and large this
proclamation—No God, carry on—almost gives the impression of someone bursting
into a room full of people minding their own business and yelling at them all:
“Nothing’s Different! Everything is
great! Keep doing what you’re doing!”
Nietzsche’s Madman in The Joyful
Science this is not. How would we
respond to this? Aside from what would undoubtedly
be a powerful (though perhaps momentary) suspicion that, just so, everything
was precisely not alright and not the same, we would, much as when a
bus turns from one block to another, merely forget its passing and go back to
what we were doing. Herein lies the
oddity: atheism, once predicated on social and moral revolution, now means normalcy (of a sort); it means
everything remains as it is right now, and as it is going to be in the future
(our hopes, our dreams, our loves) minus
an obtrusive but purely superstructural atavism called “God.” Thus similar
to Nietzsche, in a sense, for the bus ad God is already dead and this is,
not a diagnoses, but a description; unlike
Nietzsche, the bus ad discerns no metaphysical or moral consequences. There is no cost (and even its benefit is
merely the negative relief of no longer having to look over one’s metaphysical
shoulder).[vii]
Before we generalize this to a type
of secularism at large, it behooves us to note a possible heuristic distinction
to be drawn between two currents of atheism: English (generally more
conservative, more empirically minded) and German (generally more revolutionary
and philosophical). More distinctions
could be drawn, but for our purposes of illustration these will suffice.[viii] As Terry Eagleton describes, Dawkins (who had
input into the bus ad as a major contributor, and as the most prominent
supporting figure) “by and large supports the status quo.”[ix] And he continues:
Dawkins dislikes what has flowed
from Abraham for some excellent reasons; but he also finds it repugnant for
much the same reasons that one can imagine him harboring stoutly Anglo-Saxon
objections to Lacan, Situationism, agit-prop, Trotsky, Dadaism, the
unconscious, Julia Kristeva, Irish republicanism, and allowing ones children to
run naked around the garden…All of these, one suspects, would be as distasteful
to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the Virgin Birth. Jesus is an extremist as Ditchkins
[Eagleton’s combination of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins] is
not. Ditchkins, in short, is not just a
liberal rationalist, but a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist…His God-hating is
by no means the view of the dispassionate scientist commendably cleansed of
prejudice. There is no such animal in
any case. It belongs to a specific social context. [Emphasis added] The secular version of the Ten Commandments
which he commends to us in The God
Delusion, one of which counsels us to enjoy our sex lives as long as they
don’t damage others, are for the most part an assortment of bland liberal
platitudes.[x]
The social context of Richard
Dawkins (and, presumably, the bus ad) is an English middle class “North Oxford”[xi]
mentality: one that views getting rid of God as something more like wafting
away a bad smell than uprooting the basement to free it of rot. And though obviously it is impossible to
generalize that all English atheists are likewise more or less “quietist” in
this sense (Eagleton himself, as an atheist from Britain who is also a Marxist,
stands as an excellent and immediate counterexample) there is even further
historical precedent outlined by Alister McGrath that this sort of atheism is a
long standing English tradition. McGrath speaks specifically of the atheist
George Eliot (an adopted pseudonym; Eliot was in fact a woman named Mary Anne
Evans).[xii] Eliot “wanted to have Christian morality but
not Christian belief—as if the two could be separated.”[xiii] In his Twilight
of the Idols, Nietzsche took umbrage at this as only Nietzsche could:
They rid themselves of the
Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to
Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to
hold it against little moralistic females a
la Eliot. In England one must
rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing
in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. When
one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident:
this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English
flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out
together. By breaking one main concept
out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in
one’s hands. Christianity presupposes
that man does not know, cannot know,
what is good for him, what evil; he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is command; its origin,
transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth
only if God is the truth—it stands and falls with God.[xiv]
Nietzsche’s
misogynism aside (“moralistic females” undoubtedly hits potential dates like
cold water), a basic pattern here is laid out, that is in a sense the immediate
concern of this paper. We could apply
Nietzsche’s critique straightaway to Richard Dawkins’ atheism with little to no
alteration in the basic content. The
emerging atheism of our times appears as such to be, to speak by illustration,
more English than German. Though prior to Nietzsche the Germans attempted to
maintain Christian doctrine and morality (Feuerbach), they share in common
varying strategies exalting mankind to God.
Moreover, the Germans (though we must take this with a grain of salt,
this is after all only a heuristic for illustrative purposes) saw Christianity as a whole. One had to structurally supplant the entire
picture to be coherent, either through rendering Christianity entirely in
anthropological terms as a “thetic stage in human symbolic development”
(Feuerbach), in terms of dialectical materialism (Marx), wish fulfillment and
unconscious guilt from the murder of a primal father (Freud), or by turning
Christianity on its head to undo its fundamental “transvaluation of all antique
values” (Nietzsche).[xv] And this was because to the Germans, God was
the fundamental antithesis of man. No
piece of denuded Christianity could remain without its axial restructuring to
the order of man. As Feuerbach wrote,
“God must be sacrificed to love,” for if we do not do this, “we sacrifice love
to God.”[xvi]
And what he meant by this was that God had to be sacrificed, lest all the
goodness and beauty remain “extrinsic” to creation, “out there” in God’s
transcendence—God, as the supernal “container” of all value and goodness, to
these thinkers parched and stripped the creation of any goodness (they have
thereby confused Christianity with a sort of crass caricature of Platonism, or
wholesale Gnosticism, but c’est la vie).[xvii] In the terms of Henri de Lubac (beautifully
poetic as always), the Germans (along with what de Lubac terms “exclusive
humanists”) had “no desire to live upon the perfume of [Christianity’s] empty
vase. They are pouring quite a different
fluid into it.”[xviii]
The English, on the other hand,
though perceiving God as the enemy (indeed the Victorians had a tendency to
simply picture God as a cranky old man) felt the earth had intrinsic value
which did not have to be theoretically reinstituted; rather God merely had to
be lopped off, or let go like a bouquet of so many balloons. Thus they had a more immediate tendency to
perceive the ability to fracture pieces of Christianity out of its theistic
framework (de Lubac: “A keen eye can still detect the ‘theft of sacred things’
at the source of the categories which are the most profane..a parasite that
draws life from the Christian substance.”),[xix]
in the main by arguing that these components are actually the product of
nature, or scientific reason, or whatever miscellaneous explanatory apparatus
allows them to hide (or forget) the fact that certain ideas and practices were
in their inception actually historically contingent upon the Judeo-Christian
faith. In many ways this amounts to much
the same as German atheism, who themselves “thieve sacred things” in de Lubac’s
terms. But the fundamental point is that
there appears to be a sort of “common sense” view of morality, reality, and
society in English atheism in which God is purely epiphenomenal, and can be
discarded without the conceptual acrobatics of the Germans.
Thus “English” atheism, as
fundamentally “conservative,” sees essentially no difference in belief or
unbelief, because the “hard facts” of the socio/ political/ economic
environment (et al.) are maintained by miscellaneous theoretical justifications
which exempt (and hide) them from the status of “theological” or “metaphysical”
truths, and so remain undisturbed by such decisions for or against belief; and
if changes to these realms do occur,
they are based on purely immanent calculus. So de Lubac once more: “the world
they spew forth has no right to be called Christian in any but a purely sociological sense,”[xx]
such that “many who feel attraction to these revolutionary systems do not grasp
their full [metaphysical] import; they choose to see no more in these systems
than programs for temporal organization, and they leave the religious problems
to one side, or in some cases solve it for themselves in quite a different
way. How few people see what is at
bottom of the movements by which they are carried away! Nor may we lightly
decline to take on the task of disassociation.”[xxi]
As a sort of parallel-symptom, for
many theists, belief in God hardly
matters (threatening to erase the very distinction between theism and
atheism). In our nominalism we can in a
sense enact a practical atheism, as
Louis Dupré notes:
We may call the prevailing climate
a-theistic, not because faith has disappeared in our time, but because the
question whether we believe in God or not, retains little or no practical
bearing upon our lives. Braving this hostile
climate, the believer carefully nurtures the secret flame of faith—secret not
because he has to hide it, but because it has become hidden by its total incongruity with a radically secular
environment. Even to the believer the flame of his faith has become secret,
since it no longer enlightens the whole of his life.[xxii]
God, for
us, in Eberhard Jüngel’s useful description, is not merely a “lost object” with
somewhere to be, though currently is not.
God, as lost, appears now as such to have nowhere to be: “that which has no
place at all but is still supposed to be
provokes at best an indifferent shrug of one’s shoulders, rather than
head-shaking astonishment.”[xxiii]
And so the deeper symptom of modern
atheism embodied in the bus-ad appears, at least in this part of our
presentation, as a hypothesis: a
(so-called) “secular environment” has already so deeply embedded our lives in
an immanent framework, it inscribes the metaphysical and theological costs of
both belief and unbelief in a hidden way within and underneath the ritual of
the immanent, and supposedly “obvious,” “immediate” and “common sense” day to
day. It is thus also one of the immediate contexts for the impulse of the
“meta-theological” dilemma which attempts to reduce all theology to
non-theology.[xxiv] Indeed, this “modern social imaginary has now
become so self-evident to us that we have trouble seeing it as one possible
conception among others.”[xxv]
Just so the
atheist philosopher Slavoj Zizek self-identifies authentic atheism in this way:
“We are never in the position to choose directly between theism and atheism, since
the choice as such is located within the field of belief. ‘Atheism’ (in the sense of deciding not to
believe in God) is a miserable pathetic stance of those who long for God but
cannot find him (or who ‘rebel against God’…) A true atheist does not choose atheism: for him, the question is
irrelevant [to life]…”[xxvi]
[Emphasis added]. And the theological provocateur Stanley Hauerwas quite
damnably writes: “There is no stronger indication of the modern religious
situation than that we no longer know how or what it would mean to claim
religious convictions as true.”[xxvii] Once upon a time we may remember Gregory
Nazianzen warned that theology is not for everyone because it is a difficult,
dangerous, and costly discipline.[xxviii] Now however it seems theology is for no one
at all; touches down nowhere. And the
suspicion is precisely because theology’s price tags have been hidden. All is
secular, and so all is quiet on the
theological front. Or so the story goes.
[i] Walter Kasper, The
God of Jesus Christ trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Herder &
Herder, 2007), 13: “Even the propaganda of the godless in its own way keeps the
question of God alive. Complete silence about God would require
the silencing of those questions which the tradition of the human race has
answered by referring to God.”
[iii] Specifically, textbooks primarily dealing with European, as opposed to the North
American, context of theology, as endnote 22 below evidences. American theology texts undoubtedly do often
speak of atheism, but more often than not this is as a philosophical problem
regarding, for example, cosmological arguments, not issues that have “pushback”
on how the doctrine of God itself is conceived.
This may be because the American way of life is still—however
secular—deeply ingrained with the “great experiment” of fusing republican
politics with its own particular brand of theism. C.f. Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan
Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford, 2002).
[iv] Kasper, God of
Jesus Christ., 10-12, 47-55; C.f. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology vol.I trans. Geoffery W. Bromiley (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1991), 64: “With the fading of the concept of God and its
function for humanity in the public consciousness of a culture that has become
religiously indifferent, the existence of God has not only become doubtful but
the content of the concept of God has also become unclear.” And 49: “If the
theses of Christian doctrine do not make the world’s questioning of the reality
of God, its contesting and rejecting of this reality, a question which is put
to its own Christian truth consciousness, then these theses will not make
contact with worldly reality but will hover over it, and will not, therefore,
be true.”; Karl Rahner, Foundations of
Christian Faith (New York: Crossroads, 1978), 46: “This word [God] has
become as enigmatic for us today as a blank face.”; Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the
Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism
and Atheism (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1983) 4: “A theologically
responsible use of the word ‘God’ which fails to come to terms with this
dubiousness [of modern protest-atheism] is difficult to conceive of. Nevertheless . . .it would appear, then, to
be appropriate to work through this basic aporia [of God] which has emerged in
the modern age around all talk about God, as an opportunity…”; and again: “As
far as the concept of God is concerned, the history of European Christianity
until now has fallen prey to this danger in one regard. It has considered itself capable of thinking
God without thinking of him simultaneously as the crucified . . . the perfection of God required by the law of
metaphysics forbade imagining God as suffering or even thinking of him together
with the one who was dead.” (39) This in essence is the historical condition
for the unthinkability of God in his absolute transcendence, according to
Jüngel. Thus “one of the peculiar
characteristics of this proposition [that God is dead] is that it was not
always germane. Its time emerged. The truth concealed in this dark statement
cannot be understood as independent from the events of history. It can be grasped only as an historical
truth, that is, through understanding what has taken place in the history of
those particular traditions in which such a statement becomes possible.” (46);
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The
Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology trans.
R.A. Wilson and John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 227: “The only
way past protest atheism is through a theology of the cross which understands
God as the suffering God in the suffering of Christ, and which cries out with
the godforsaken God ‘My God why have you forsaken me?’”
[v] Philip Clayton, The
Problem of God in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing,
2000), 3.
[vi] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 139; it is in a similar sense that
Moltmann legitimates talk of “Christian atheism.” (Crucified God, 251).
[vii] Thus Conor Cunningham makes a very interesting
observation: “When we ask, do you believe in God? – the form that this takes,
presumes that in the absence of an intelligent, and free Creator, existence is
an unproblematic concept. In strict
terms, consequently, the question of whether God exists is misdirected, to say
the least…It is, because talk of God in this way tends to provide a realm for
the formation of nature, or of the natural subject, over and against the
supernatural, and so on. In this way,
the god that we must be rid of is the autonomous subject, who, rather
comfortably, rests upon the implied significance of solidity – the firm ground
beneath their feet that neither needs, nor is affected by, their belief or non-belief
in God.” (Conor Cunningham, “Suspending the Natural Attitude: From Thomas
Aquinas to Michel Henry,” in Peter M. Candler and Conor Cunningham, ed., Transcendence and Phenomenology (London:
SCM Press, 2007), 263-264.)
[viii] Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory, 180 reminds us of an existing distinction as well
between French critiques of Christianity (total rejection) and German critiques
(“retreat in due order” which “attempts to salvage Christian dogmatic and
ethical content in anthropological terms.”)
[ix] Terry Eagleton, Reason,
Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009), 64.
[xi] Ibid., 65. Eagleton
caveats: “I use the term ‘North Oxford’ in an ideological, rather than
geographical, sense. Dawkins may be
relieved to learn I don’t actually know where he lives.” (Ibid.)
[xii] Alister McGrath, The
Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief In the Modern World (N.L.:
Doubleday Publishing, 2006), 127.
[xiv] Quoted in Ibid.,
132.
[xv] C.f. D. Stephen Long, “Fetishizing Feuerbach’s God:
Contextual Theologies as the End of Modernity,” Pro Ecclesia vol.XII no.4: 447-472.
[xvi] Ludwig Feuerbach, The
Essence of Christianity (N.L.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2013),
15.
[xvii]
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
(Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2003), 106f.
[xviii]
Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1998), 113.
[xix] Henri de Lubac, The
Discovery of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1996), 182.
[xx] De Lubac, Drama
of Atheist Humanism, 71.
[xxi] Ibid., 71-72. C.f.
Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom:
A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1983),
13: “There is no more powerful indication of religion’s superfluity in our
culture than Christianity’s acceptance of itself as one ‘religion’ among
others. It reveals an assumption of the
priority of so-called ‘faith’ over particular convictions of the Christian faith, e.g. the nature of God,
the significance of Jesus, the eschatological fate of the world. As a result, Christianity, both in practice
and in sophisticated theological expression, is reduced to an interpretation of humanity’s need for meaning or some
other provocative anthropological claim. [Emphasis added] I do not mean to deny that every theology
involves anthropological claims, yet theology today has become particularly
adept at beginning and ending there.
[Emphasis added].
[xxii]
Quoted in Peter Casarella “’Modern Forms Filled
With Traditional Spiritual Content’: On Louis Dupré’s Contribution to Christian
Theology,” in Peter J. Casarella and George P. Schner, S.J., Christian Spirituality & The Culture of
Modernity: The Thought of Louis Dupré (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1998), 278.
[xxiii]
Jüngel, God
as the Mystery of the World, 54.
[xxiv]
Here this hypothesis is supported by James K. A.
Smith’s recent work Desiring the Kingdom:
Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,
2009), 25: “The core claim of this book is that liturgies—whether sacred or
secular—shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental
desires and our most basic attunements to the world. In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of
people, and what defines us is what we love.”
[xxv] Charles Taylor, Modern
Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2.
[xxvi]
Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 97.
[xxvii]
Hauerwas, The
Peaceable Kingdom, 14.
[xxviii]
Gregory Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to
Cledonius trans. Fred Williams (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
2002), 26 (Oration 1.3)
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