Remembering Anzac Day

There has been much discussion across all forms of the media about "remembering Anzac Day", or was it "remembering" the soldiers who died and were wounded, firstly at Gallipoli and then World War 1 of who died for their nation, or who paid "the ultimate sacrifice". Note the theologically loaded language here. Christians should have problems with this term. It brings us back within whispering distance of attempts to explain the significance of Jesus' death as political victim of non-resistant messianic encounter with the Roman imperial power.

But I digress. All in all last week while there was a great deal about "remembering", much of it fairly vague until the consensus about who and what we were "remembering" was brought under question. First Nations peoples wanted to "remember"  those of their nations who were killed in the occupation of this country and in the frontier wars. They were firmly ruled out of the official process.  Previously women's attempts to" remember" those who were victims of rape in war were also excluded from participation in the official public ceremonies of "remembering". So who gets "remembered" was contested, though the apparent official guardians of the scope of our "remembering", the RSL, ensured that the boundaries were suitably policed.

But what are we doing in our "remembering"? There was, to judge from letters to the editor of the Canberra Times, very little clarity, or community agreement about the significance and meaning of the public ceremonies of "remembering". And this is interesting because it makes clear that the whole controversy relates to a public process, or ritual. Individuals after all can stop on any occasion of significance to them and "remember" those of their family and friends who were killed or suffered in war without official sanction. This "remembering"at an individual or family level involves a bringing someone to mind, and grieving for their suffering, that they did not go on to live life to its full extent, in some way or another, and that for those who were known personally to us, that we have been deprived of their presence.

But controversy there was about meaning. For some it was a moment to affirm the horrors of war and say "never again". For others it was about affirming the significance of the "sacrifice" of those who were killed and acknowledging how much we "owed" them, how we should be prepared to offer ourselves to our country in gratitude. The language used was religious to its core. It made very clear that as William Cavanaugh has argued that "the holy" has migrated from the church to the nation/state.

Christians should take note of this migration and be prepared to assess the claims of the state when they come clothed with the aura of "the holy" and the language of sacrifice. After all according to the earliest Christians, Christ's death meant the end of sacrifice and its claims on human life. The primary "remembering" to which Christians are called is to the meal shared which celebrates Christ's life, death and resurrection and the end of sacrifice, a meal in which the barriers that would divide those who are "holy" from the "profane" are broken down as we recognise Jesus in the sharing of bread with the stranger.

Religion as idolatry

I am continuing to meditatively read Nicolas Lash's beautifully written lectures, Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God. Much of what he has to say on 'religion' turns on its head most of the commonly held assumptions in contemporary discourse about the meaning of the term.

Most religion is, of course, idolatrous. We ascribe divinity to, we treat as sacred, a vast diversity of ideas and institutions, peoples, place stories, customs, which are, at worst, destructive of ourselves and of the world in which we live, and, at best, ambivalent intimations of where true holiness, beyond all our construction and imagination might be found. 

Thus it is that the great religious traditions of this world function as schools in which people learn that there is no feature of the world - no nation, institution, text, idea, ambition - that is, quite simply, sacred. To be a pupil in these schools (and all the teachers in these schools are pupils too) is to learn that we are called beyond the worship of the creature; to learn that that alone is truly 'holy', is quite beyond location and imagination, radically transcends the secular in which we live and die, bearing the gift and burden of contingent freedom. It is within the world, in all the world, in all we think and do and say and see, achieve and suffer, and by no means only in some small margin of the world which people, these days, call 'religion', that we are required to be attentive to the promptings of the Spirit, responsive to the breath of God. (39-40)

Good and Bad Religion

The following review originally appeared in St Mark's Review , No.217, August 2011 (3).

But what is religion?

Peter Vardy, Good & Bad Religion, SCM Press, London, 2010, paperback, 179 pages, ISBN978-0-334-04349-2, RRP $29.95

The necessary connection between religion and violence has become a familiar trope in both media commentary and the public polemics of the “new” atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Peter Vardy, Vice-Principal of Heythrop College in the University of London, has written, Good & Bad Religion to redirect the debate from being a purely defensive reaction on the part of religious people and as an attempt to find common ground between believers and atheists.

Good & Bad Religion is a brief, paperback, relatively accessible in style, targeted at a thoughtful, but non-academic audience. In a non-defensive even-tempered manner Vardy has sought to place the argument about “religion” and the contemporary critique of its dangers, and indeed its inhumanity, more clearly within the history of western philosophical and theological thought than has often been the case in the debate to date.

The organization of the book is simple. Vardy develops his argument in two distinct parts and at the end of each part he provides a clear summary of the argument that he has developed and the conclusions that hedraws.

In Part One, entitled The Challenge, Vardy sketches the critique of religion provided by contemporary atheists.  Religion can be bad, Vardy concedes to the atheists, but supporters of “good” religion should be at one with them in resisting “bad” religion. It may be, Vardy asserts, that … in today’s world there is a more important distinction between atheist and theist, namely that between those who pursue bad religion and those who stand for truth and what is right, whether it be within, or without a religious framework (p14).

Vardy then takes us through a discussion of the nature of truth and the good in the major philosophical traditions as an aid to assessing what “good” and “bad” religion are. The author concludes with an account of Aristotle’s approach to the nature of human flourishing which he argues is the most helpful way of distinguishing between  ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion.

Aristotelian philosophy, Vardy contends … offers a partial solution to the problem of devising standards against which to judge religion and religious practices. … the natural law approach is compatible with the major world religions and indeed has been used by them in the past to extend and enrich their philosophies of religion … Further the approach may be acceptable to atheist philosophers as well.  …most normative philosophical systems rely on defining good and bad in relation to what it means to be a fulfilled human being.(p.67)

In Part 2: A Way Forward Vardy covers a range of issues that arise in the assessment of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad religion’, starting with questions of authority and textual interpretation, and then moving on to the topics of science and religion, justice, equality and freedom. From the discussion in each of these chapters Vardy provides us in The Conclusion with a summary based on an Aristotelian, natural law framework, of six broad conclusions, and 26 more detailed criteria that we can use to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ religion.

Given the natural law basis of his argument, the conclusions that Vardy draws are coherent, admirable and largely predictable. The major problem that I have with the structure and argument that he develops lies not in his analysis but in the underlying assumptions about the character of religion that are touched on briefly in the first chapter but are not systematically developed.

The brief references to religion that he provides do not add up to a consistent, or coherent account. Vardy starts out promisingly by noting that religion is the cord of ideas, beliefs and practices that hold communities together and that it is not a consistent monolithic phenomenon. However, he then goes on to affirm that religion can be used in damaging ways, but that it is important to the human psyche and cannot be eliminated, thus moving towards an essentialist and non-historical account of religion.

This is followed by the observation that religion has often been taken over for political purposes. A key question arises here. If religion is as he acknowledges, the cord that holds communities together, how could religion not be political in character, and can we then distinguish in any meaningful way between religion and politics?

The working assumption that I draw from Vardy’s references to religion, seems to be that we all know what religion is, and that it can be treated as a timeless generic category that can be evaluated in its specific manifestations as either ‘good’ or “’bad’.

The problem with such a generic account of religion becomes clear when Vardy refers to the early Christians as having taken a stand against “bad or debased religion”. This really will not do. The early Christians affirmed that they were followers of Jesus whom they affirmed as “Lord”, a term in with both political and the religious connotations and implications. What they took a stand against was not “bad” religion, but the specific political religion of the Roman Empire, because Roman officials sought a commitment to the Emperor that would overrode their primary and basic loyalty to Christ.

I would argue against overall thrust of Vardy’s project to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion, that people are not committed to ‘religion’ in general. People are committed to living lives from within specific traditions, traditions that embody differing accounts of the world, and differing accounts of what it is to be human and how one should appropriately live and shape one’s life.

As William Cavanaugh argues in The Myth of Religious Violence, religion has a history … and what counts as a religion and what does not in any given context depends up different configurations of power and authority … the attempt to say that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena, is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern secular state as it developed in the West. In this context religion is constructed as transhistorical, transcultural, essentially interior, and essentially distinct from public secular rationality. (p59)

Vardy’s apologetic is overall an eirenic and thoughtful response to the new atheists. He seems to share with them an account of religion as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon. If we do not accept his account of religion, the task before Christians and members of other faith traditions and communities is to interrogate the history of our own traditions, their specific beliefs and practices, both for their implication in encouraging violence at the individual, family and communal levels, and for their resources for witnessing to, and embodying shalom. This seems to me to be a more promising, though more difficult project than the one that Vardy has undertaken.

What is religion, really?

I have been sound off about the issue of 'generic religion' in some recent blogs. Here is a review of a recent book that takes up the same theme. This is a revised, extended and slightly more conversational version of a review that originally appeared in St Mark’s Review (No.217, August 2011). Word limits left the published version somewhat elliptical in style.

Let me start by pointing to the connection between religion and violence that has become a familiar theme in both media commentary and the public polemics of the “new” atheists. Peter Vardy, Vice-Principal of Heythrop College in the University of London, has written, Good & Bad Religion to try and redirect the whole debate. He wants to get away from the sort of purely defensive reaction on the part of religious people that he believes, quite rightly I think, is neither helpful, nor interesting. Instead he embarks on an attempt to establish that there is some common ground between believers and atheists.

The outcome of this worthy enterprise is Good & Bad Religion, (SCM Press, 2010) a brief paperback, relatively accessible in style and targeted at a thoughtful, but non-academic audience. Hopefully this sort of audience still exists. In a relatively non-defensive and consistently even-tempered manner Vardy moves to place the entire public polemics about “religion” and the contemporary warnings and assumptions of its dangers, and indeed its deep and consistent inhumanity, more clearly within the history of western philosophical and theological thought than has been the case in much of the debate to date.

While this is a helpful step in placing the debate into a wider context, I want to note that Terry Eagleton’s interventions on this issue by comparison have sought to remind us of the taken for granted political background to the contemporary emergence of this debate.

Vardy develops his argument in two distinct parts and at the end of each section, he provides a clear summary of the argument that he has developed and the conclusions that he draws.

In Part One, entitled The Challenge, Vardy sketches the critique of 'religion' provided by contemporary atheists.  Religion can be bad, Vardy concedes to the atheists, but supporters of “good” religion should be at one with them in resisting “bad” religion. It may be, Vardy asserts, that … in today’s world there is a more important distinction between atheist and theist, namely that between those who pursue bad religion and those who stand for truth and what is right, whether it be within, or without a religious framework (p14).

Vardy then takes us through a discussion of the nature of the truth and the good in the major philosophical traditions as an aid to assessing what “good” and “bad” religion are, He concludes with an account of Aristotle’s approach to the nature of human flourishing which he argues is the most helpful way of distinguishing between  ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion. This is an interesting philosophical move, given the role that engagement with Aristotl,e played in the early development of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity and the fact that he moved on to recover the thought of Thomas Aquinas because of Aristotle’s inadequacies in the restatement of a natural law approach to ethics.

Aristotelian philosophy, Vardy contends … offers a partial solution to the problem of devising standards against which to judge religion and religious practices. … the natural law approach is compatible with the major world religions and indeed has been used by them in the past to extend and enrich their philosophies of religion … Further the approach may be acceptable to atheist philosophers as well.  …most normative philosophical systems rely on defining good and bad in relation to what it means to be a fulfilled human being.(67)

In Part 2: A Way Forward Vardy covers a range of issues that arise in any attempt to undertake an assessment of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad religion’, starting with questions of authority and textual interpretation, and then moving on to the topics of science and religion, justice, equality and freedom. From the discussion in each of these chapters Vardy provides us in The Conclusion with a summary based on an Aristotelian, natural law framework, of six broad conclusions, and 26 more detailed criteria that we can use to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ religion.

Given the natural law basis of his argument, the conclusions that Vardy draws are coherent, admirable in their intent and largely predictable. The major problem that I have with the structure and argument that he develops lies not in his analysis, or his conclusions, but back in the underlying assumptions about the character of religion that were touched on briefly in the first chapter but not systematically developed, either then, or later.

The brief references to 'religion' that he provides in the early part of the book do not add up to a consistent, or coherent account of what religion is. Vardy starts out the discussion in a promising vein by noting that religion is the cord of ideas, beliefs and practices that hold communities together and that it is not a consistent monolithic phenomenon. However, he then goes on to affirm that religion can be used in damaging ways, but that it is important to the human psyche and cannot be eliminated. In taking the argument in this direction he is moving   inexorably towards an essentialist and non-historical account of religion. Religion becomes a generic category into which particular faiths or traditions can be shoehorned (or not).

This is followed by the observation that religion has often been taken over for political purposes. A key question arises here. If religion is as he acknowledges, the cord that holds communities together, how could religion not be political in character, and can we then distinguish in any meaningful way between religion and politics? Augustine in his critique of Rome seems to have found himself up to his neck in political theology when discussing “religious” issues. This phenomenon has reappeared min modern guise in the form of civil religions, of which the cult of Anzac Day has emerged in Australia as a recent local variant.

The working assumption that I draw from Vardy’s references to ‘religion’ seems to be that we all know what religion is, and that it can therefore be treated as a timeless generic category that can be evaluated in its specific manifestations as either ‘good’ or “’bad’. Who indeed would be in favour of “bad” “religion”?

The problem with a generic account of religion becomes clear when Vardy refers to the early Christians as having taken a stand against “bad or debased religion”. This really will not do. The early Christians affirmed that they were followers of Jesus whom they affirmed as “Lord”, a term in with both political and the religious connotations and implications. What they took a stand against was not “bad” religion, the Romans called them “atheists”, but the specific political religion of the Roman Empire. Roman officials sought a commitment to the Emperor that would overrode their primary and basic loyalty to Christ. That after all is the whole point of the book of Revelation.

I would, therefore, argue against overall thrust of Vardy’s project to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion, that people are not committed to ‘religion’ in general. People are committed rather to living lives from within specific traditions, traditions that embody differing accounts of the world, and differing accounts of what it is to be human and how one should appropriately live and shape one’s life in that. Indeed they may have very differing understandings of what the "world" is.

As my friend William Cavanaugh argues in his important work, The Myth of Religious Violence, religion has a history … and what counts as a religion and what does not in any given context depends up different configurations of power and authority … the attempt to say that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena, is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern secular state as it developed in the West. In this context religion is constructed as transhistorical, transcultural, essentially interior, and essentially distinct from public secular rationality. (59)

Entirely in its favour is that, in an era of loud shouting, and rhetorically excessive, and factually limited ambit claims passing as argument from protagonists on both sides of the debate, Vardy’s apologetic is overall an eirenic, even tempered and thoughtful response to the new atheists that tries to reframe some of the terms of the debate. He seems willing to share with them an account of religion as a transhistorical and trans-cultural phenomenon and hopes that something can be built on that common ground.

If, however, we do not accept Vardy's implicit account of religion as generic, as I do not, the task before Christians and members of other faith traditions and communities will take us down a different path from the one that he maps out in this book. Our task will be to interrogate the history of our own traditions, their specific beliefs and practices, both for their implication in encouraging violence at the individual, family and communal levels, and for their resources for witnessing to, and embodying shalom. This seems to me to be a more promising, and interesting, though more difficult project than the one that Vardy has undertaken and one that will require churches as communities committed to peacemaking to get involved.

Rediscovering the "Jesus Movement" Revolution

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.

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/04/28/terry_eagleton/.

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

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. . . [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.

Which Religion? Whose Spirituality?

Browsing through a questionnaire on social attitudes at the start of my long march through a PhD, I was brought up short by some questions that invited me to assess my religiousness and/or spirituality.

The problem is that I don't consider myself very religious, or very spiritual for that matter.

The difficulty is that both terms are used generically, without clear definition,as though we all knew what the essence of religion and spirituality respectively are. Unfortunately, for anyone wanting to use the terms this way, there is no such thing as a "religion" and no such thing as a "spirituality" without further qualification.

The question we need to ask, with appropriate apologies to Alasdair McIntyre, is "Which religion? Whose spirituality?"

As the question implies, both religion and spirituality at the very least, need some form of qualification before I could even begin to think about, contemplating giving any sort of an answer to the above question.

The issue of specifying which gods we are worshipping is important, because as Rowan Williams pointed out in his address Analysing Atheism, Unbelief and the World of Faiths, the early Christians were in a very significant and life-threatening sense not religious.

... to understand what atheism means, we need to know which gods are being rejected and why. Thus an early Christian was an atheist because he or she refused to be part of a complex system in which political and religious loyalties were inseparably bound up. 'Atheism' was a decision to place certain loyalties above those owed to the sacralised power of the state.

Simon Barrow in What difference Does God Make, makes clear, drawing on the work of Nicholas Lash, why "individual religiousness" is not really the point.

Before modernity, the term ‘gods’ was understood, correctly, as a relational one, designating whatever it was people worshipped – gave ultimate worth to. It resided in occurrences, activities and patterns of behaviour – not concepts. Explains Lash: “The word ‘god’ worked rather like the word ‘treasure’ still does. A treasure is what someone... highly values. And I can only find out what you value by asking you and by observing your behaviour… There is no class of object known as ‘treasures’… valuing is a relationship.”

However, with the dominance of instrumental reason, ‘gods’ became, correspondingly, things (objects, entities, individuals) of a certain kind, a ‘divine’ one. Analogously, the ‘home territory’ of God-understanding shifted from worship (the assignment of worth-ship) to description (the assignment of properties). It became a metaphysical enterprise rather than a matter of appropriate relationship. The difference is that the former has to make claims about essence or ‘being’ (of a person, a thing, or ‘god’) in order to find it meaningful. The latter does not, though it needs a good idea of what it speaks.

This double shift of meaning and affection fundamentally corrupted and disabled the modern comprehension of ‘God’ – because God is, logically and necessarily, beyond definition (delimiting) and categorisation. God is most definitely not a ‘thing’ belonging to a class of things called ‘gods’.[10] “Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists all have this, at least, in common: that none of them believe in gods”, says Lash. Therefore religions are best considered ‘schools’ in which people learn properly to relate to God precisely by not worshipping any thing – not the world nor any part, person, dream, event or memory of it.

Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, nationalism and even atheism offer specific, and in varying ways overlapping and competing schools, in what it is to be and live humanly in the world in which we find ourselves. Spirituality, like religion is never generic. And in the account of religion that I am arguing for the substantive difference between "religion" and "spirituality" begins to disappear, in so far as spirituality is expressed in differing, and non-generic ways of learning to live in relationship to the world.

The key difference is that "spirituality" is seen as differing from "religion" in being less tied to institutional structures and intellectual formulations. This outcome is what we might expect if the move in public identification from "religion" to "spirituality" is the result of the deconstruction of Christendom. This process has generally fallen under the label of secularization, a process which is notably been played out in the geographical areas of the world shaped by Christendom.

In the light of this development the sociology of religion needs to be reconsidered and perhaps de-constructed as being powerfully shaped imaginatively and historically by its relationship to Christendom and its underlying assumptions. Such an exercise might have the helpful result of relativising its explanatory usefulness for Christians thinking about mission and church growth strategies. The analysis offered by this discipline with its focus on the "decline of religion" and the "rise of spirituality" if used without appropriate caution could simply result in importing the problematics of Christendom back into our ecclesiology and practice of mission.

Note: an edited and slightly extended version of this is now available on Ethos: EA Centre for Christianity and Society blog.

Why Easter needs to be less religious

Attending a Good Friday service at a small suburban Anglican church this year I found myself grappling with the question as to whether the service was about the death of Jesus, or whether it was really in the end about us and about being religious.

The bulk of the service was fine with the focus on reading of Scripture, Psalm 22 and the reading of the passion narrative from John. Then we got to the reflection which turned to focus on us and a focus on the things we wanted to let go through writing them on to a slip of paper and hammering them to a cross set up at the front of the worship space. While this might have been therapeutic it did not have much to do with what happened on Good Friday and became an occasion for individual introspection. We are here in the realm of religion, in which the focus is on individual and the internal, private, spiritual experience unrelated to public issues and the wider world.

Stanley Hauerwas observes that the words from the cross "Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing," reveals that all our assumptions about God and the salvation wrought by God  are rendered presumptuous. What is happening is something much more significant and much more  broad ranging in its implications than an obsession with ourselves. "We are made members of a kingdom governed by a politics of forgiveness and redemption." (Cross Shattered Christ p.31) Yet this note was almost totally absent in the religiously focused Good Friday service that I participated in.

We became focused on ourselves and yet as Stanley Hauerwas reminds us in his reflection on the cry of dereliction "My God, My God why have you forsaken me?" we are confronted in these words by the sheer unimaginable differentness of God which shatters all our attempts to understand God in human terms. Any attempt to short circuit this profound reality of difference is the first step towards the creation of an idol, the creation of a god whose ways we can understand and manipulate through our internal emotional responses, to make us feel comfortable and at ease in the world. 

Our idea of God, our assumption that God must possess the sovereign power to make things come out all right for us, at least in the long term, is revealed by Jesus' cry of abandonment to be the idolatry that it is.(p.64)

Focusing on ourselves and our emotions in the context of a world redefining and almost unimaginable event is to shrink the Gospels down to a point where they can be absorbed into a consumer, narcisitic "me" focused culture and community. Our liturgy, our hymns and prayers that we share in our gatherings of the community that would seek to follow this strange messiah needs rethinking.

A rejection of Christianity as being centered on individual "religious experience" has profound implications for how we understand, and have misunderstood, in the contemporary world, the character of liturgy. Christian liturgy argues William Cavanaugh in his discussion of "Liturgies of Church and State":

... knows no distinction between sacred and secular, spiritual and material. To participate in the liturgy is to bless God as God blessed all of material creation, to respond to God’s blessing by blessing God. And as Schmemann says, “in the Bible to bless God is not a ‘religious’ or a ‘cultic’ act, but the very way of life.”14 As such, liturgy is the natural (not simply supernatural) act of humanity, to imagine the world as God sees it, and to return the world to God in praise. All of creation is “material for the one all-embracing Eucharist,” at which humanity presides as priest.15

 It is only because of our fallen condition that it seems natural not to live eucharistically, to accept the reduction of God and God’s blessing to a small reservation of life called “sacred.”16 When this happens, what remains outside the sacred is not simply the “secular” or the “natural,” stripped of God, disenchanted, and functioning on merely material principles. For the Bible does not know the material as some self-sufficient substrate upon which is overlaid the spiritual. There is no such thing as pure nature devoid of grace. ...  But what remains when humans attempt to clear a space of God’s presence is not a disenchanted world, but a world full of idols. Humans remain naturally worshiping creatures, and the need for liturgy remains a motivating force, as we have seen in supposedly secular space. Christ came not to start a new religion but to break down the barrier between human life and God. Therefore to be redeemed from our fallen condition means to resist the imagination that would bifurcate the world into sacred and secular. Casting away this division means seeing also that Christian liturgy and the liturgies of the world compete on the same playing field, and that a choice between them must be made.

Jesus was not interested in religion

Some comments from a collection essays and sermons by Christoph Blumhardt, chapter 6 "The Kingdom is at Hand" from Action in Waiting available in both hard copy and as a free e book from Plough Publishing: Plough books/ActioninWaiting.html

It is the task of Jesus’ disciples to put the nature of Jesus into action. This fact is generally not understood,since Jesus has been called a founder of a new religion.But that is not God’s word to the world. His aim was never to give us a new religion in order that we might live a bit more decently – in that case Moses and his law would have sufficed. 

With Jesus’ simple command to the disciples the Sav­ior is saying, “Don’t make a religion out of me! That which I bring from God is not a religion, for all reli­gions are rigid. They don’t want to move forward, they don’t intend to change. They set up shrines, they insti­tute museums, they set up councils, and because of all this they are a stumbling block to the world.” As a matter of fact – to be quite frank – our religions are a hindrance not only to the world but to the history of humanity.

Nothing is more dangerous to the advancement of God’s kingdom than religion: for it is what makes us
heathens. But this is what Christianity has become. Do you not know that it is possible to kill Christ with such Christianity! After all, what is more important –Christianity or Christ? And I’ll say even more: we can kill Christ with the Bible! Which is greater: the Bible or Christ? Yes, we can even kill Christ with our prayer.

The ABC's treatment of "religion"

Paul Collins in an article in Eureka Street "ABC's Mainstream Religion, tested found wanting"
http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=16731 scored a good few hits on the severe limitations of ABC treatment of "religion" in their mainstream news services.

The promise by Mark Scott, the ABC General Manager that the demise of the Religion Report would be covered by substantial treatment of religion in ABC's mainstream news services has proved to be a snare and a delusion.

Collins points to Scott's defense of his approach as reported in the Australian recently. According to Collins:

The Australian reported that Scott told a prayer breakfast in Adelaide that the media has trouble covering issues of faith, often framing religion in a political context rather than as personal belief.

He said: 'We train our journalists to be skeptical, to seek out answers, look for documentation and to not accept things on face value ... And part of the challenge about faith is that some of the things we hold to be true ... are not visible, cannot be proven.'

This suggests that Scott defines faith in terms of personal conversion and belief, rather than engagement with the broader community context where faith encounters culture, society, ethics and political reality.

This is a troubling view for the ABC GM to take. Of course belief can't be 'proven', but it certainly can and should be examined. That is what theology is about, faith seeking understanding as Saint Anselm said in the 11th century. But it seems Scott is not conversant with mainstream theology, and this provides a clue as to why he axed The Religion Report.

Journalists might well interpret "religion" in a political context but contra Scott that in itself is not a problem - religion and politics cannot be easily disentangled - never have been, never could. The problem is that the reporters rarely have enough background to tease out the deeper connections and find the people who can comment on their significance.

As Collins points out by way of example:

Then there was Benedict XVI's encyclical letter Charity in Truth, which was covered by Sunday Nights with John Cleary but was missed in the mainstream. And when will we get an analysis by the mainstream ABC of Barak Obama, Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd's very public church going?

Can we expect the 7:30 Report to explain the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr on Obama ('one of my favorite philosophers') and Rudd and Brown's strong Christian socialist backgrounds? Back in April in London both Rudd and Brown spoke in St Paul's Cathedral decrying the 'false god' of 'unfettered free markets'. ABC Board member Janet Albrechtsen was apoplectic in The Australian, but there was no explanation anywhere else on the ABC.

There is more to be said about the character of "religion" - a term much more problematic than it looks - but that will have to wait for another time and a consideration of William Cavanaugh's latest book The Myth of Religious Violence that I just picked up today.

The problem with reason

The new atheists have been vocal about the need for "reason" and how the application of reason is all that is required for people to escape the illusion of "religion".

Romand Coles highlights the difficulty and the illusion of appealing to some pure idea of reason above and beyond the influences and sheer messiness of human life.

... our visions and arguments concerning the "reasonable" and "the public" (and for that matter "religion" I would add) are infused with and are significantly and discrepantly shaped by particular histories, doctrines, perceptions, and sensibilities with which we identify - in ways that seem powerfully to elude transparency. (p.246 Beyond Gated Politics)

Church, World and Religion

The Bonhoeffer daily reader, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: I Want to Live These Days with You in its readings in June focuses on the Unity of the Church - interestingly many of the extracts deal with a theology of the relationship of the church and world and why it is not all about individual religious experience and meeting the spiritual needs of humans as consumers.

Bonhoeffer deconstruct's a Christendom mentality that is committed to top down institutional power and forces our attention back again and again to Jesus Christ as the key to our practice of community witness and humanity.

June 13:
When God in Jesus Christ claims space in the world - even if only in a stable "because there was no room for them in the inn" (Luke 2:7) - then at the same time God summarizes in this small space the whole reality of the world and reveals its ultimate foundation. So also the church of Jesus Christ is the place - that is the space - in the world in which the lordship of Jesus Christ is witnessed and proclaimed over all the world ...

The space of the church is not there to make a piece of the world controversial. but precisely to attest to the world that it remains the world, specifically the world loved and reconciled by God. The church does not desire more space than it needs in order to serve the world with its witness to Jesus Christ and to the world's reconciliation with God through Christ. Also the church can defend its own space only by fighting not for it but for the salvation of the world. Otherwise the church becomes the "society of religion" that fights for its own cause and thereby ceases to be the church of God in the world. The first instruction to those who belong to the church is not, therefore, to do something for themselves - say create a religious organisation, or lead a pious life - but be witnesses of Jesus Christ to the world.

June 15:
The church is the humanity that was incarnate, condemned and raised to new life in Christ. Thus to begin with it has essentially nothing at all to do with the so-0called religious functions of human beings; it has to do rather with the whole of human kind in its existence in the world and in all its relationships.
What the church is all about is not religion but the form of Christ and Christ taking shape among a group of human beings.

Wendell Berry - novelist

Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself by Wendell Berry
Counterpoint, 2000.

Wendell Berry is a wonderful story teller, is a sharp observer of the changes in a community and a real theologian to boot.

This is the first novel of his that I have read. I will be looking to get hold of others. I was moved and engaged by the story of Jayber Crow, orphan, barber and bachelor - a man who discovered he did not have the call to preach.

Berry's doubts about organised religion find voice in the life and spiritual struggles of Jonah Crow. After years of readig the Gospels Jayber observes that he has come to believe that ...
Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one.

Berry is also good in his critique of the spiritualisation of Christianity, that finds voice in the reflections of Jayber Crow on the importance of the body and the goodness of creation.

In a fine review of this novel Michael Wilt observes:

Taken to a church-run orphanage, young Jonah believes he hears the call to be a preacher and, when the time comes, enrolls in college on a scholarship in “pre-ministerial” studies. But it is not long before he finds himself in trouble.

If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins –- hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust -- came from the soul. But these preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.

Jonah comes to recognize that he is not called to preach. “I was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere but not knowing where,” he says, echoing Dante. After some trial and error, that somewhere becomes Port William, the community in which he had been born but from which he had been absent since the age of ten. His journey to Port William, through the rising waters of several days of winter rain, evokes the biblical Jonah’s water-journey, but is most memorable for the hospitality he receives at its end. Having picked up the barbering trade in the orphanage and practiced it for a time to support himself, Jonah buys Port William’s vacant shop and opens for business. He is eventually re-christened Jayber by the locals, and can finally say, “I felt at home.”
http://www.nimblespirit.com/html/jayber_crow_review.htm

Should Christians care about religion?

The confusion, among christians, as well as in the society at large about what the separation of religion from politics and the increasing accummulation of power by the state needs to be untangled. The theologian William Cavanaugh has done some great work in challenging the received wisdom on this issue.


The story of separation of "religion" and “politics” in Europe and the development of the “secular” state, as normally narrated, begins with the wars of religion triggered by the Reformation. A state free from "religious" control was necessary to ensure tolerance and suppress the violence of competing religious forces. This narration gains plausibility against the background of the co-option of the Christian church by the Roman Empire, the emergence of Christendom and the use of imperial violence to enforce conversion to the Christian faith. According to William Cavanaugh (“A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House – The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State” Modern Theology, 1995)

"The "Wars of Religion" were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State; they were in fact themselves the birthpangs of the State. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between "Protestantism" and "Catholicism," but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order. … behind these wars is the creation of "religion" as a set of beliefs which is defined as personal conviction and which can exist separately from one's public loyalty to the State. The creation of religion, and thus the privatization of the Church, is correlative to the rise of the State. "

As a result we have the invention of “religion” as a sphere of life, a realm of individual choice and private concern disconnected from public, community and social life is intertwined with the emergence of the state as "sovereign", with a total monopoly of power within a limited geographic area. In another article Canavanugh argues that

"… the term "religion" has accompanied the domestication of Christianity. It has facilitated the marginalisation of the radical claims of the gospel and the transfer of the Christian's ultimate loyalty to the supposedly rational spheres of nation and the market. The church is now a leisure activity: the state and the market are the only things worth dying for. The modern concept of religion facilitates idolatry, the replacement of the living God with Caesar and Mammon. " ("God is not Religious")