That said, I haven't stopped reading. But as a change of pace, I'll be focusing on two articles I came across in the New York Times - both disheartening. Normally I want this to be a blog of appreciation, but sometimes I also feel salty. So there you go. I created "Why Read Theology" to encourage people to read more theology - and to spur myself into reading some theologians I haven't spent a lot of time reading, and revisiting ones that meant a lot to me. But sometimes, you've gotta read theology just to debunk and critique the stuff you come across every day.
The first article is an opinion written by Peter Atterton, called "The God Problem," found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/-philosophy-god-omniscience.html
All three are my reaction while reading article one
It is pretty terrible. I won't give a lengthy quote of it, but it's right there in its entirety if you'd like.
The second is an interview piece by Nicholas Kristoff with Serene Jones - president of Union Seminary. It's also... disappointing. Both in its content and in the content its spurred in my social media circles since it was published. You can find it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/opinion/sunday/christian-easter-serene-jones.html?fbclid=IwAR0iHt_mVuWqUM890qNE291zSauy5XHApOd1SdB0t0nKuHmt2iinDQtoQDc
My reaction like four paragraphs into article two
On the first article: Atterton believes that belief in God (and I believe that he means the Christian understanding of God based on who he cites) is incoherent because there are issues and seeming contradictions/paradoxes when we have to reckon with concepts like omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and moral perfection. There are a ton of issues with this article, but I'm just going to boil it down to this one: Atterton does not understand Christianity. He just doesn't. I don't even think he wants to. I can't say for sure why he doesn't want to try to understand it, I can't speak to his motivations. You can find other critiques if you'd like (leave 'em in the comments), but only someone who is utterly and completely uninterested in Christianity could say something like:
"I shall here ignore the argument that God knows what it is like to be human through Christ, because the doctrine of the Incarnation presents us with its own formidable difficulties: Was Christ really and fully human? Did he have sinful desires that he was required to overcome when tempted by the devil? Can God die?"
Really?
When writing an article about how the "omnis" and how "moral perfection" present logical dilemmas for people who believe in God - he is utterly uninterested in dealing with a central guiding concept that has defined orthodox Christianity since the beginning (or, if you're radically skeptical, since the Council of Nicaea): that Jesus Christ is God Incarnate. Any time we say any thing about God and the "omnis," we do so through the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as attested to within the New Testament. What Atterton rejects out of hand is the linchpin to making any kind of sense of every other issue he brings up if he is speaking to the Christian tradition in particular. Which is what I'm going to assume because he's writing without bringing up any theologians of other traditions - itself a grave error if he's setting out to talk about how all faith in God is "incoherent."
It's laughable, rather trollish image: Atterton tells us what's wrong with believing in God without actually engaging with what Christians say about God. He picks a fight with a straw man that's wearing a cross necklace. Sure, he pays a little lip-service to Aquinas, Plantinga, and Jerome citing them WRESTLING with the omnis and moral perfection, but not actually how they deal with the omnis in a charitable or recognizable way.
To use some classically Lutheran language - part of Atterton's problem (and there are many problems) in this article is that he's focusing all of his attention on what we would call deus absconditus, alternatively the "Hidden God," the "God of Nature," "The Naked God," and sometimes even "God of the Philosophers." This is the God that we set out to understand in our own terms: a God hidden among the omnis and expectations of our own tricky schemes. God's will becomes hard to separate from our own will. We set up the God we want, the rules we want, the ways we want and say "this is God, this is what God wants." That's not something we necessarily do all on our own, but something we also do as a society over generations. We speak of God as though God was not in the room. As though God is saying nothing.
The opposite of the Hidden God is the Revealed God - and Christians believe that the revealed God is Jesus Christ - life, ministry, death, and resurrection. Jesus is the Word of God, the image of God, the revelation of God, the Son of God, of one being with the Father, the self-expression of God, etc. We proclaim that there is no omniscient one apart from the one who was born of Mary, and knew nothing apart from crying, feeding, and excreting. We proclaim is no understanding of "omnipresent" apart from the the temporal man who taught the Jewish scriptures for three years, primarily among the poor. We proclaim that there's no "omnipotent" one apart from the one who was publicly executed by an empire in said empire's many expressions of oppressing a marginalized religious/ethnic population. This is the truth that our Christ-ian scriptures attest to in the New Testament. This is the message two-thousand years worth of faithful leaders were entrusted with (and were faithful to to varying degrees).
This is what we call "the Revealed God," God clothed in flesh, God made in some manner comprehensible and communicable. It's this God, who lives, dies, and rises, who also does stuff like "create" and "forgive sins," "cultivate just societies," "welcome the stranger," and drink an awful lot of good wine without harming God's self or others. And the revealed God seems a lot more interested in us being involved in those things than in sorting out leisurely mind games about "omnis" or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Indeed, as Christians we find all of those things remarkably linked to one another. We're awfully bad at them without God's help. Indeed, we confess that we need God's help, and the Holy Spirit is actually at work trying to get these things working among us all. And we only deal with concepts like the omnis, or morality, through this lens. Through the cross. Through Christ. That's how we understand God - not in our own terms - but in God's.
To simply dismiss the incarnation in writing about God in Western/Christian terms, is akin to saying you want write about physics, but couldn't possibly be bothered to learn about math. Read theology so that you don't sound like an idiot to Christians when you're an atheist who's making a critique about Christianity.
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On the second article - Serene Jones' interview. An old friend suggested it must be edited in some unfortunate way because it just reads far too cringe-inducingly to be truly legitimate. I hope that's true.
For the first three questions, Jones' responses are actually pretty spot-on. She kind of side-steps the issue of the bodily resurrection in ways that reveal that it's just not super important to her. Now me, I think the bodily resurrection is of grave (hem hem) importance. But a lot of better theologians than I am, and faithful believers formed differently from me are far more concerned with concepts like meaninglessness, spiritual oppression, shame, and other similar concepts that rob life of its value more than they are concerned with the bodily aspects of the resurrection. Bultmann, Tillich, MLK Jr., all sorts of good folks fit into that camp. They still believe that Christ is the answer - it's just that they are more concerned by lives ruled by despair than they are concerned about death. I can't fault them for that, the 20th century was a rough time for them all. It's a dark and grim thing to look at these survivors of many terrors (war, racial terror, etc.) and tell them what's good for them when they experienced the love of Christ in different language than we do. Jones has inherited the mantle of their language and it is good language. The dreaded "Liberal Protestantism" isn't always bad, everyone. Sometimes its' better equipped to heal people than the rigidly orthodox. Sometimes we have to see God at work in it.
My issue with Jones comes in the fourth question - and continues throughout the remainder of the article. Jones says: "For me, the message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death. That’s a much more awesome claim than that they put Jesus in the tomb and three days later he wasn’t there. For Christians for whom the physical resurrection becomes a sort of obsession, that seems to me to be a pretty wobbly faith. What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie? No, faith is stronger than that."
What's wrong with wibbly-wobbly?
First part? Great. 100%. Love is stronger than life or death. Second part about the "physical resurrection?" Ugh. First off, no one will ever find "the body of Jesus" outside of the Eucharist and in the lives of believers in this pilgrim journey. In the most scientific terms - there can physically be no evidence of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, son of God, ward of Joseph. It's just not going to happen. To even bring up that possibility is just silly. No one would believe such a fanciful concept. There is no filled tomb of Jesus - and to see a filled tomb with Jesus' name on it categorically means none of the faithful will believe its' Jesus' historical tomb. It would just be the grave of some dude named Jesus who had a very coincidental name - and probably a forgery. Second, isn't it just a convenient and fancy idea for love to be counted as "stronger than life or death" if it isn't acted upon? The physical resurrection unites word with deed. Without flesh it seems like just an idea and a nice thought among ideas and nice thoughts. Preachers of the physical resurrection have to believe God has skin in the game.
The issue goes on: Jones calls the faith of those who care "too much" about the bodily resurrection "wobbly." That's rough - considering so many of the biblical writers and the theologians and saints of the church have found tremendous comfort in it. To know that Christ bears their wounds, to know that Christ's life was no trick, to know that life and body actually matter in the fullest and richest and most literal sense. They believed in the bodily resurrection - wobbles and all. And you know? Jones knows this, she's not an insular person, she has a whole faculty of brilliant people and has learned from some of the best. It seems really odd for her to make such a comment about the faiths of others as though hers were so much better for not getting into the "meat" of the incarnation and resurrection. We don't need to know the science of it, but to know that Christ's life is true, and true life lives on beyond death, in unity with God. And it's condescending as hell to say that the faiths of people centuries before her are wobbly, or haven't interacted with issues of the historicity of Jesus' resurrection.
We can say the same about her comment on Mary's virginity or the afterlife. It comes off with such a smug and uncharitable reading of others.
And yet - the reaction against Jones in a lot of corners of the internet seem SO MUCH WORSE. The ways she's dismissed as though she's a fool, or a prophet of a false god, or that Union is terrible. I've also seen these critiques combined with a heavy dose of misogyny. But the thing is - her critiques are often either valid or at least have a kernel of truth we must reckon with. I mean, we know that the resurrection has been used in some pretty terrible ways. There are ways to talk about the resurrection that DO sound like the divine child abuse that Jones criticizes. Human hatred justified through religion is dangerous (though hatred doesn't need institutional religion's help to be awful). Charlatans do misuse prayer in order to make us feel like our loved ones die for "not praying enough," and there are selfishly motivated, authoritarian, "orthodox" Christians, whether we like it or not.
Jones' fiercest critics seem to be blind to (or even supportive) of these things. Hearing them talk terribly about her as though SHE were the big problem, as though she were uninformed, is some pretty wicked stuff. We all can, and are called, to do better.
Read theology because there isn't one institutional voice for Christianity. A variety of thoughts and traditions keeps your mind sharp, humble, and willing to be corrected and guided by a Spirit who does love us and is working through us.
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