Category Archives: Protestantism

Is there a liberal Christian theism? II

Standard

I am going to cruise straight on, even though some very good questions (and answers!) were provided in the comment stream of “Is there a liberal Christian theism? I.” I do not want to look closely at those questions and answers here, for in a sense they anticipate and pre-empt many things that I want to say now (as I supposed, when I let the first instalment go without this conclusion, they might).

I want to begin, then, with the oft-quoted passage from Augustine’s commentary on Genesis, part of which I uploaded and linked in my first instalment of this post on liberal Christian theism. The importance of Augustine for my purposes (and for the purposes of those who wish to deny that scripture is to be read literally) is simply that, in his commentary, Augustine suggests that, where the facts are known to be otherwise than they are depicted in scripture, it must be that scripture was intended to be read symbolically or figuratively. Thus, it is suggested, even those who first accepted the authority of the Bible were aware that it does not aim at the truth of science, but at religious or theological truth, and the Bible’s errors of fact are not justly held against the Bible as a source of religious enlightenment and truth.

Continue reading →

About these ads

A Vile, Intolerant Man

Standard

Like my wife Elizabeth, I have deep regrets that the institution that brought us together, and provided the context within which we could have a rich and rewarding life together for nearly twenty years until her death in Switzerland, should now be one that I find it difficult to speak of with respect. But that is, not to put too fine a point on it, very much the case. I used to think that, as an Anglican, I could largely disregard what other Christians believed, and could, thus, separate myself from beliefs and practices which I then regarded as clearly immoral expressions of intolerance and hatred. But I was naive then, and thought that this was not characteristic of Anglicanism as I had come to know it. It is true that I began that way, holding, in a very conservative way, beliefs and attachment to traditions which effectively excluded from the church all but those who could understand Christianity according to a fairly narrow, Anglo-Catholic interpretation of what constituted true Catholicity and therefore true belonging in the church; but I gradually lost those hard edges, and, while still inveterately Anglican, began to think of Christianity as, at its best, a broad house in which believers and unbelievers, as well as adherents of other religions, could find a place of peace where they could explore their humanity together without prejudice.

When I had come to the end of my active ministry I was not all that far from being an unbeliever myself. I could no longer take seriously the central Christian affirmations of the supernatural birth of Jesus — well, from childhood I had never really accepted that — or his death and resurrection, or his miracles and bodily ascension into heaven (which makes no sense, of course, in terms of scientific cosmology). Nor could I make any sense of the claim that Jesus was both God and man. This became more and more unintelligible to me, especially when, considering the gospel narrative of the life, teachings and acts of Jesus, he came to seem to me not only not in any relevant sense a perfect man, but someone of his time and place whose claim to superior morality came to seem, almost daily, less and less convincing. While he never came to seem to me as morally reprobate as Muhammad, his moral failings are too prominent — especially his teachings regarding a place of eternal punishment, where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies — to accord him even approbation as a good man. What is unique to him — say, his prescription that we should love our enemies — seems untenable, and what is worthy in his moral teaching is almost entirely borrowed from Jewish sources. I make no judgement, and do not intend to, regarding Jesus’ historical existence, for it seems obvious to me that the gospel Jesus is not a figure of history, whatever historical reality may lie behind it. The historical questions seems to me largely uninteresting. If gods do not come to earth as Jesus is said to have done, then the gospel Jesus cannot be an historical figure.

Continue reading →

How Odd of God to Choose the Jews: Martin Luther, Cardinal Pell, and the Intolerance of Religion

Standard

This is a continuation from my last post about why I write about religion, but from a slightly different angle. While it was mentioned in the press, and Cardinal Pell responded to criticism of his comments about the Jews, and about the dire suffering of the Germans (believe it or not!), it seemed to me worth thinking about for a few more minutes, at least. Something like this should not be allowed to slip quietly under the radar. When cardinals make anti-Jewish remarks — that is, Christian ones — it may seem like a slip of the tongue, but it goes much deeper than that. It’s a bit like when Margaret Somerville says, without any tongue in cheek, that the only reason people are concerned about assisted dying is the intense individualism of contemporary Western society. That, of course, is the flip side of the pope’s concern about relativism. Relativism happens when you don’t agree with the pope. Individualism is intense when individuals claim rights the church is not prepared to countenance.

However, to the point. The epigram in the title (“How odd of God to choose the Jews”) is attributed to William Norman Ewer (1885-1976), one time foreign affairs correspondent for the London Daily Herald. Doubtless in intent an anti-Jewish witticism, it was countered, according to Wikipedia, by equally witty replies:

Not odd of God. / Goyim annoy ‘im

– attributed to Leo Rosen. Or:

But not so odd
As those who choose
A Jewish God
Yet spurn the Jews

– written by either Cecil Brown or Ogden Nash.

Why this sudden burst of interest in anti-Jewish wit and repartee? Well, as I said above, simply because Cardinal Pell, in his debate with Richard Dawkins on Australia Broadcasting Corporation’s “Q & A” the other day, lapsed into some surprising antisemitisms of his own, without any apparent reason or justification. Apparently, this Prince of the Church has apologised, but this should not mean that he should be given a free pass just because he has made pro forma apology. What he said was said before a TV audience and a viewing audience of hundreds of thousands if not millions, and now it’s posted on Youtube for all to see and hear. It was clearly unrehearsed, and thus it would seem expressed a view readily accessible to memory, no doubt because not seldom repeated. And saying that Jesus was the greatest human being who ever lived doesn’t do a thing to qualify the harm, because, for Christians, Jesus was rejected by the Jews, who thereby took the blame upon themselves and upon their children and their children’s children. But couple these remarks about the Jews with his comments about the suffering of the Germans and you end up with the obvious fact that antisemitism is a deeply rooted part of his mental economy.

Continue reading →

Reminding myself why I write about religion

Standard

To anyone stopping by choiceindying.com it must seem as though my principal aim is to argue against, and do whatever damage I can, to the religious project. I have no illusions about the degree of success that I should expect from any such venture. Religions are monolithic, deeply entrenched culturally, and still retain the unquestioning respect of the majority of people in the world. My little contribution is not likely to make very much of a dent in religion’s social standing, and it is doubtful that the pope or other Christian leaders, or the leaders of any other religion, will lose much sleep over the things that I write here day by day.

Nevertheless, the kinds of things one reads about regarding the role that religion plays in the world should convince any reasonable person that the task, though it seems hopeless, is a necessary one. Some of the outrageous laws that are being passed in various states in the United States, about the status of the embryo, or on the teaching of bogus “science” in science classes, or the spectacle of the Catholic Church intruding itself into public space in order to continue its oppression of women — such as the proposed oppression of women in places like Honduras — or the suppression of freedom in every Muslim country in the world, not to mention practically every Muslim community in the free world: these are reminders of how necessary it is that we go on opposing religion in season and out of season, and why we need to ignore or lambaste people like Alister McGrath, who, in a recent Australian Broadcasting Corporation op-ed piece, “The Future is not looking so ‘Bright’ for Atheism” — which has got to be one of the sillier pieces that this silly man has published — took the stillborn project of using the word ‘Bright’ as a positive way of referring to nonbelievers to suggest, falsely, that the growing marginalisation of the term is a sign of the flagging fortunes of atheism. It only needs to be pointed out that McGrath’s book, The Twilight of Atheism, prefigured the most dramatic rise in militant unbelief for over a hundred years, to recognise how out of touch McGrath really is. Despite his credentials, this is a man not worth paying much attention to. To go from teenage rebellious atheism to the writing of a three-volume “scientific” theology — which is about as plausibly scientific as reiki therapy — is an achievement of sorts, but one which, in the end, will fade into the deepening sands of time, unsung, and, I am sure, unmourned.

Continue reading →

Andrew Brown out of bounds — again! Secularism and Reason

Standard

I was going to continue with my series on Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great today, but then I bumped into Andrew Brown way out of intellectual bounds, and decided a few more words directed toward him, as well as towards the huge brouhaha brewing over the place of religion in public life, would possibly be more to the point. The US bishops were girding up their loins for a long battle with unseen forces — even to the point of shedding blood! – at the same time that Baroness Warsi and her Tory pals made their pilgrimage to Rome in defence of religion against the looming powers of secularism. Suddenly, it seems as though the whole religious world has lost touch with reality, beleaguered and threatened by an imagined bogeyman whom they have chosen to name “secularism” even though, like their god or gods, there really is nothing there.

Andrew Brown says that “militant secularists” fail to understand the rules of secular debate, and in an article bearing that title simply fails to explain what he means. Indeed, he makes no sense at all this time, and although purportedly about militant secularists, he does not explain what he means by the term. Consider this paragraph from his article, in which he claims to be explaining what he means by militant secularism:

There are three kinds of people in Britain today who might be taken for militant secularists: that is to say people who are not just themselves unbelievers, but have an emotional investment in the extirpation of religious belief in others. There are the adolescents who have just discovered “rationality”; there are gay people who feel personally threatened by traditional monotheist morality; and, in this country, there are parents frustrated by the admissions policy of religiously controlled schools.

This is simply incoherent, as just a moment’s thought on Brown’s part should have confirmed. He does mention Dawkins in connexion with adolescent secularists, some of whom, we are told,

… discover Richard Dawkins the way that others discover Ayn Rand. Large confident solutions to all the world’s problems, which are only held back by the stupidity and self-interest of the old, will always appeal to teenagers.

But that’s about as close to a statement about militant secularism that he gets. After discussing the uniquely bewildering English school system for a few irrelevant paragraphs, he then says, suddenly, and irrelevantly:

None of these groupings are large enough in themselves to threaten the future of Christianity, or of Islam, in this country. But they make a useful enemy for politicians such as Lady Warsi.

Their real offence, though, is that they don’t understand the rules of secular debate.

The pronouns “their” and “they” don’t refer to anything that could be construed as militant secularism, and the claim that “they don’t understand the rules of secular debate” is arguably without any reference at all.

Continue reading →

Kirsopp Lake, the decline of intelligent religion, and the danger of reaction

Standard

Yesterday, as I was exercising on my treadmill, which stands next to my bookshelves, and wanting something to read, I reached over and took out an old book, published in 1925, The Religion of Yesterday and To-morrow, by Kirsopp Lake, which I hadn’t read for some time. It had to be an old book so that it would lie flat and open, without the pages wanting to curl back and obscure what I was reading as I walked. So I began somewhere in the middle. It didn’t really matter where I began, because I had read it before, but by chance I happened upon a passage which is relevant to what I have been saying, as well as to what others have been writing about, regarding fundamentalism, literalism, allegory, figurative biblical language, myth and so on, so I thought I should at least give you a small glimpse into the mind of this rather remarkable Christian theologian and teacher, who began ministry in England, taught for ten years at the University of Leiden, and then spent some years teaching at the Harvard Divinity School. He was a prolific author, though I have only read one of his books. This one.

Let me begin with this quote, since it ushers us immediately into the issues being discussed:

I do not think that any early church writer ever taught that the facts mentioned in this faith were only symbolical or allegorical. So far as I know, even Origen never doubted that the story of the creation was literally true. He did undoubtedly think that it also had an allegorical meaning, but that is typical of his school of interpretation; it added allegory, it did not substitute it for the plain historical meaning. Moreover to take Origen as typical of the early Church is a perversion of history. Would that he had been! [81-2]

This has always been my sense of the relationship of allegory to the literal meaning of the text. The agony in the garden, for example, whilst being patient of an allegorical meaning, has also been taken as a strictly literal account of what Jesus did on the night that he was  betrayed. The betrayal itself was open to allegorical and figurative meaning which could apply to each Christian, for each Christian is understood to have betrayed Jesus in just this way, and thus was to hold himself responsible for all that happened the next day, for the arrest and trial that night, and for the scourging and the crucifixion that were to follow.

Continue reading →

Pope poops in Erfurt, and other ejaculations from on high

Standard

In a sermon at a church in Erfurt, during his current “state visit” to Germany, Pope Ratzinger had this to say:

The more the world moves away from God, the more clear it becomes that man, in the hubris of power, the void in his heart and in the longing for fulfillment and happiness, is losing ever more touch with his life.

The unmitigated presumption and gall of this man never ceases to amaze! Being out of touch with life! As one of the pope’s supporters — Simon Rapp, the federal chaplain of the Association of Catholic Youth — said:

I hope he finds some other themes. It’s not that he has to just take up every request from the people, but there has to be a sign that something is moving.

So far the pope has concentrated on getting Christians to join together in a struggle against the growing tide of secularism:

The most urgent thing for ecumenicalism is, namely, that we can’t allow the push of secularism to force us, almost without noticing, to lose sight of the major similarities that make us Christians, and which remain a gift and a challenge for us.

This was said by the same man who shamelessly offered disaffected Anglican priests a way to make the transition to Catholocism through an Anglican Ordinariate in the Catholic Church. One Catholic observer in England said, last year, “that Anglo-Catholics have recognized their battle is “lost.” However, Pope Benedict’s appreciation of their tradition and his establishment of a special church structure for them will help restore their patrimony to the Catholic Church.” So much for ecumenism, and for the major similarities between Christians! Just google ‘Anglican Ordinariate’ to see the fizz of excitement amongst conservative Anglicans that this has generated; and think how much corresponding damage has been done by the pope to Anglican unity, and consider the pope’s present appeal in the light of that.

One thing that is worth mentioning, considering that Church of England has said that during the next five years one of the major emphases of the church should be countering the effect of the new atheists, and seeing that the pope is now urging Christians to  gang up against secularism, is that clearly, whatever the loudest critics of the new atheism have been saying, the new atheism is on the right track. We’ve got them worried. We are now a force to be reckoned with. Of course, Mooney and Baggini and Stangroom, you don’t have to thank us; but you should be able to see now how wrong you have been. And, anyway, you knew it all along. It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

But just think what a transformation this is. Four hundred years ago Christians fought amongst themselves almost to a standstill. Parts of Germany were depopulated by the murderous violence of Christian against Christian. Now they need each other just to make themselves look strong! The pope is no longer confident in his millions of Catholics. Perhaps they don’t all really believe that strongly after all! Just for insurance, perhaps we can get other really serious Christians to join us to fight the awful apparition that seems poised to take over and alienate us even further from ourselves!

However, what angers me more than anything is that this is an effort by the pope — and, he hopes, by other Christians — to intrude their beliefs into the public sphere where they don’t belong. And before anyone goes off on a tangent about democracy and majorities, consider this. I’ve been doing some research over the last few days into the assisted dying legislation in the Netherlands and Belgium. In Belgium, it turns out, many Catholic doctors do not refuse assisted dying to their patients, not because they are not, as good Catholics, opposed to assisted dying, but because, in their relationships with what are called ‘moral strangers’, Catholic morality is not the issue. What is important in relations with ‘moral strangers’ is a morality based, not on revelation or special doctrines, but on what can be shared with others on the basis of reason. This is, in fact, whether the pope knows it or not, what secularism is all about.

Religion and Social Pathology

Standard

This post is going to be in the nature of a rant, and I am saying this right up front so that there is no misunderstanding about what I am doing. It is, you might say, an unvarnished expression of the “Militant Modern Atheism” that the philosopher Philip Kitcher so eloquently opposes — though in a nuanced way approves – in an essay with the same title. This is not, however, a careful analysis, and does not intend to be. But I think it is something that needs to be said without prevarication or circumlocution. The politeness and the analysis can come later, but to start with, I need to say how I regard religion, because I think that religion is, in its major manifestations, a kind of social pathology, and it is not surprising, on the basis of this, that places where religion is very strong, and belief held with ardent zeal, should be places where society itself is under threat, as it is today in Pakistan. Of course, Pakistan is only the most obvious instance of the workings of the social pathological aspects of religion. I think aspects of this social pathology are evident in other places as well, and that we need to be strongly opposed to these forms of social pathology if our world is going to have a future in which men and women can truly flourish. So, just to recapitulate: the following is, as I say, in the nature of a rant. I will come to the more sober analysis of these things in posts that will follow, but we need to begin to see the problem clearly and to see it whole (as Thomas Arnold might have said). Once we have done that, we can look at it more soberly, and with a bit more analytical rigour. With that warning, then we can proceed.

Continue reading →

“Integrating” Science and Religion

Standard

Today I want to go where angels fear to tread. This is prompted mainly by Jerry Coyne’s recent foray in the strange world of the Biologos Forum, which has, as its mission statement: “The BioLogos Foundation explores, promotes and celebrates the integration of science and Christian faith.” Not relate, notice, but integrate, which means, I take it, to combine into a whole. So Biologos intends to take science and religion — and specifically the Christian religion — and to relate them as parts of a single whole.

What reasonable expectation is there that they can do that? The answer to that question is, fairly self-evidently, none. It may be possible to play around with biblical stories and the religious doctrines derived from them, and interpret them in ways that make them less conflicting with science, but not only are science and religion completely different cultural undertakings, religion cannot, except by way of courtesy, be considered a discipline of knowledge at all, and to integrate science and religion requires that they be, in some sense, about the same things, and have, at least, analogous types of confirmation.

Continue reading →