I cannot recall during my lifetime a public debate around
issues of belief and “religion” anything quite like that sparked by Richard
Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and their fellow travellers, commonly referred to
under the collective title of the “new atheists”.
Before going to
consider the significance of that debate we should take note in passing the
reminder by David Bentley Hart that “religion” as the term is used generically
does not actually exist. There are, Hart reminds us …a very great number of traditions of belief and practice that, for the
sake of convenience we call "religions", but that could scarcely
differ from one another more. Perhaps it might seem sufficient, for the
purposes of research, simply to identify general resemblances among these
traditions: but even that is notoriously hard to do, since every effort to
ascertain what sort of things one is looking at involves an enormous amount of
interpretation, and no clear criteria for evaluating any of it. One cannot
establish where the boundaries lie between "religious" systems and
magic, or "folk science", or myth, or social ceremony.
There is not any compelling reason to assume a genetic continuity or
kinship between, say, shamanistic beliefs and developed rituals of sacrifice,
or between tribal cults, and traditions like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity,
or to assume that these various developed traditions are varieties of the same
thing. One may feel that there is a continuity or kinship, or presuppose on the
basis of one's prejudices, inklings or tastes that the extremely variable and
imprecise characteristic of "a belief in the supernatural"
constitutes proof of a common ancestry or type; but all of this remains a
matter of interpretation, vague morphologies, and personal judgments of value
and meaning, and attempting to construct a science around such intuitions can
amount to little more than mistaking "all the things I don't believe
in" for a scientific genus. One cannot even demonstrate that apparent
similarities of behavior between cultures manifest similar rationales, as human
consciousness is so promiscuously volatile a catalyst in social evolution. ...
… the task of delineating the "phenomenon" of religion in the
abstract becomes perfectly hopeless as soon as one begins to examine what
particular traditions of faith actually claim, believe, or do. … what sort of
thing is the Buddhist teaching of the Four Noble Truths? What sort of thing is
the Vedantic doctrine that Atman and Brahman are one? What sort of thing is the
Christian belief in Easter"? What is the core and what are the borders of
this "phenomenon"? What are its empirical causes? What are its
rationales? Grand empty abstractions about religion are as easy to produce as
to ignore. These by contrast are questions that touch on what persons actually
believe; and to answer them requires an endless hermeneutic labor - an
investigation of history, and intellectual traditions and contemplative lore
... (192-193) In the Aftermath: Provocations
and Laments (Eerdmans, 2009).
After that significant and provocative diversion, let me to
return to the “new atheists”. It is, I would suggest, not coincidental that this
debate seems to be having its biggest impact in societies, like Australia, societies
that are moving through the transition from a Christendom settlement, into a
time that perhaps might best be labelled, if provisionally, post-Christendom.
Their argument is driven at least in part by a reaction against a memory of the
close connection of church and state, and the violence and terrible compromises
that resulted from that connection.
The very public polemics of theses “new atheists’ have
produced a range of responses, some of which offer entertaining and
invigorating reading, and vigorous intellectual argument, in about equal
proportions.
A highly significant contribution has come from Terry Eagleton with his rambunctious Terry lectures, Reason Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the
God Debate (Yale University Press, 2009), a guaranteed page turner, with a take no prisoners edge to
its aggressive, intellectual Irish night at the pub rhetoric. Possibly more
substantial in the detail of its argument is the work by David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution
and its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press, 2009), which
offers by contrast to Eagleton a rather more grace-full and
elegantly written historically informed demolition of many of the assertions
made by Hitchens and Dawkins about the ills arising from Christianity’s impact
on the world during the past two thousand years.
I won’t be attempting a comprehensive or comparative review
of both books. Rather I want to unpack one particular and profoundly important
theme that is central to the case that both authors want to make. In identifying this point of common concern I
was helped to focus on it by Shane Claiborne’s account of his experiments in
practicing the Christian faith under the title The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an ordinary radical that I
was reading around the same time as Eagleton and Hart.
Having taken the risk of rhetorical overkill in the title of
his book, it transpires that Claiborne has strong support for his assertion of
the revolutionary character of the Christian movement from both Eagleton and
Hart.
Before proceeding to outline their respective accounts
of the Christian revolution and its moral and political significance, I want to
draw attention to one other strongly shared judgment by Bentley and Eagleton,
in their response to the current wave of atheist critics of Christianity. They
have in common the conviction that the quality of atheist criticism of
Christianity has sadly declined from days of yore, or at least the time of
Nietzsche. The current crop of critics are, in their view, embarrassingly ill
informed, if not down right incompetent, in the case they make against
“religion” in general, and Christianity in particular.
Eagleton in taking this stance, I need to emphasis, is not
writing from inside the Christian movement, though we was exposed to it through Irish Catholicism when growing up and
engaged with liberation theologians during his university years. What Christian
doctrine teaches about the universe and the fate of man may, he admits, not be
true, or even plausible. The issue of truth he says is not the question
immediately at hand. The matter at hand
for him is one of the ethics of controversy, how the argument is advanced. The
case against critics such as Dawkins and Hitchens, referred to by Eagleton
collectively as “Ditchkins”, is that they have failed morally and
intellectually in the way they have prosecuted their case. … Critics of the most enduring form of popular
culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its
most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by
savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook.
Eagleton it must be acknowledged has had Dawkins in
his sights for some time, as his review of the God Delusion in the October 2006 issue of the London Review of Books makes perfectly clear. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching. The Terry
lectures evidently gave him the excuse and the space that he was looking for to
make his case out at greater length.
Hart strikes a similar note in his judgement of the current
crop of atheist polemics: I can honestly
say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than
many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists
entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made
turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any
other form of dreary fundamentalism. (4) Hart too has had his eye on the
“new atheists” for some time. His review of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural
Phenomenon entitled “On the Trail of the Snark with Daniel Dennett”
displays the same characteristics of articulate prose and intellectually
substantial critique.
But having digressed again, the temptation to quote and
quote again from both Hart and Eagleton on the inadequacies of the “new
atheists argument, is almost totally irresistible, so clear, forceful and
entertaining is their prose, I must delay no longer in addressing the puzzle of
why it is that the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton and the Orthodox
theologian David Bentley Hart have arrived at a point, if not of furious
agreement, then have moved into
reasonable proximity around a judgement about the revolutionary character of
the Christian movement, and its impact on the way we in modernity, (or is it
post-modernity?), still engage with the world.
Eagleton moves very early in his lectures to make his
case against the new atheists on the grounds of Christianity’s revolutionary
character. His line of argument is of particular interest because it does not
rest on letting Christianity in its actually existing manifestations throughout
history off for its failures. The case he wishes to make does not provide an
apologetic for the failures of the Christian church. Eagleton after all begins
the first paragraph of his book with the observation that, Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs. For the most part,
it has been a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and
oppressive ideology. (xi)
In a fascinating on-line review in Salon
Andrew O'Hehrir observes of Eagleton’s opening gambit: That's quite a start, especially when you
consider that the point of Eagleton's "Reason, Faith, and Revolution:
Reflections on the God Debate" … is to defend the theory and practice of
religion against its most ardent contemporary critics. ... http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/04/28/terry_eagleton/
While it is, as O’Hehir observes, quite a start,
Eagleton is only warming up. In Chapter 2 “The Revolution betrayed” he observes
that Far from refusing to conform
to the powers of this world, Christianity has become the nauseating cant of
lying politicians, corrupt bankers and fanatical neocons, as well as an
immensely profitable industry in its own right . . . The Christian Church has
tortured and disembowelled in the name of Jesus, gagging dissent and burning
its critics alive. It has been oily, sanctimonious, brutally oppressive and vilely
bigoted. (56) http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article6293043.ece
Despite the record of betrayal, a record that Eagleton acknowledges
has been matched in actually existing Communism, he proceeds to suggest that
atheism of a certain character, and politically engaged Christian orthodoxy
that takes the call of Jesus seriously might not be that far apart. After all
Christians in the Roman empire were regarded as atheists.
According to Paul Vallely in his review of Reason, Faith and Revolution in The Independent Eagleton is clear that
the … history of religion is "a
squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and oppressive
ideology." Just as communism has misunderstood Marx, he argues, so the
Church has betrayed Christ by backing an establishment of warmongering
politicians, corrupt bankers, and exploitative capitalists for centuries. The
Jesus of the gospels, he insists, was as radical a revolutionary who took the
side of "the scum of the earth". The love he offered was as
transformative as true socialism. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/reason-faith-and-revolution-by-terry-eagletonbr-the-case-for-god-by-karen-armstrong-1749432.html
Andrew O'Hehir points us in the same direction when he
observes later in his review, You can
almost hear the steel chairs creaking as the last secular liberals rise to
depart when Eagleton declares where his true disagreement with Richard Dawkins
lies, which does not directly concern the existence of God or the role of
science. "The difference between Ditchkins and radicals like myself,"
he writes, "hinges on whether it is true that the ultimate signifier of
the human condition is the tortured and murdered body of a political criminal,
and what the implications of this are for living."
What Eagleton is saying here is that in the crucifixion
of Jesus we have an ultimate account of what it is to be human, and that this
is where the revolutionary character of the Christian movement is grounded.
In his
review of Hart, Stefan Beck argues that explore 
. . . [Nietzsche] had
the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually
was--above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion--rather than allow
himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had
been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual
neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated
Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the
weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious
of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself
that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining
Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or
innate human sympathy." (Liberation theology” in The New Criterion)
Hart makes a similar case to
Eagleton for the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus, though he makes the
case from inside the Christian movement and argues at some historical depth of
the extent to which Christianity has changed the way we understand what it is
to be human. This practice of humanity in Hart’s view has profound moral
implications that have gradually worked themselves into the way we understand
the world and its sufferings.
Hart argues that, [W]e shall never really be able to see Christ’s
broken, humiliated, and doomed humanity as something self-evidently contemptible
and ridiculous; we are instead, in a very real sense, destined to see it
as encompassing the very mystery of our own humanity… . Obviously, of course,
many of us are capable of looking upon the sufferings of others with
indifference or even contempt. But what I mean to say is that even the worst of
us, raised in the shadow of Christendom, lacks the ability to ignore those
sufferings without prior violence to his or her own conscience. We have lost
the capacity for innocent callousness.
To follow through Hart’s account as to the
depth and significance of the Christian revolution for our understanding of
what it is to be human would require a substantial essay in its own right. I
need to emphasis that what Hart offers is no easy apologetic to justify or to
dismiss the profound failings of the Christian church. The changes that its has
brought have only worked there way through our institutions and culture
gradually and over a long period of time. Nevertheless he wants to insist the
changes are real and profound, they are an interruption, the full significance
of which it is hard for us to understand for those of us who now stand on the
other side of that interruption. Eagleton provides a helpful account of why
such interruptions are significant with reference to the work of the French
philosopher Alan Badiou (see pages 117-119 of Reason Faith and Revolution)
In the first few centuries of Christian witness
the gospel was regarded by the intellectuals of the time and those holding
positions of power throughout the Roman empire, as an outrage. Christians were
enemies of society, impious, subversive and irrational. … for advancing the grotesque and shameful claim that all gods and
spirits had been made subject o a crucified criminal from Galilee – one who had
during his life consorted with peasants and harlots, lepers and lunatics. This
was far worse than mere irreverence, it was pure and misanthropic perversity;
it was anarchy. (115)
Christianity did not preach a message of
liberation from the flesh. This crucified criminal in his death and
resurrection, body and soul, was associated with a proclamation of the goodness
of creation, the transfiguration of the flesh and the glory of creation. Hart
develops this account against a detailed rebuttal of accounts of a cheerful
paganism but of a despondent society full of religious yearning in which the
dominant spiritual movements sought an other worldly release. (144-5)
The Christian difference was found in the
placement of charity at the centre of the spiritual life. It raised the care of
widows, orphans, the sick and the poor to the centre of the religious life. In
the third century the bishop had substantial responsibilities for social
welfare. His duties encompassed responsibility for the education of orphans,
aid for poor widows and purchase of firewood and food for the destitute.
According to Hart however this is only to touch the surface of the difference
between Christianity and the older religions of the empire.
The story of Peter weeping at his betrayal of
Jesus is for Hart one of those moments that displays the difference
Christianity has made. …in these texts
and others like them we see something beginning to emerge from darkness into
full visiblity, arguably for the first time in our history : the human person
as such invested with an intrinsic and inviolable dignity and possessed of an
infinite value. It would not even be implausible that our very ability to speak
of “persons” as we do is a consequence of the revolution in moral sensibility
that Christianity brought about. (167)
The form of God and the form of the human
person according to Hart has been revealed …
to them all at once, completely then and thenceforth always in the form of a
slave. (182)
The
account Hart develops of the revolutionary character of Christianity connects
to his recognition of the power of Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and the
significance of what it would mean to reject Christianity and its view of the
human. In an article “Believe it nor Not”
published in the theological journal First
Things, (May 2010), Hart states that, Because he understood the nature of what had happened when Christianity
entered history with the annunciation of the death of God on the cross, and the
elevation of a Jewish peasant above all gods, Nietzsche understood also that
the passing of Christian faith permits no return to pagan naivete, and he knew
that this monstrous inversion of values created within us a conscience that the
older order could never have incubated. He understood also that the death of
God beyond us is the death of the human as such within us. If we are, after
all, nothing but the fortuitous effects of physical causes, then the will is
bound to no rational measure but itself, and who can imagine what sort of world
will spring up from so unprecedented and so vertiginously uncertain a vision of
reality?
… on the sheer
strangeness, and the significance, of the historical and cultural changes that
made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands
of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an
entire civilization’s moral and aesthetic contemplations—and for the deaths of
all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the
ancient order would never have accorded them.
One does not have to
believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its
metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event
should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the
foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical
contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul
that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms.
Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one
still, then, elects to turn away.
