A while back we discussed the Atheist Ad campaigns and whether or not such an approach to “sparking” discussion was effective or not. While we certainly had differing viewpoints mentioned, what we didn’t investigate, is the validity or depth of the modern Atheist movement as seen through such authors as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, or Sam Harris. In many ways, each of these authors has pulblished their own Atheist Gospel, aimed at showing how belief in God is not only illogical, but also inherently violent to the human race.

Of course there are ardent supporters and opponents of such a movement and of such “Gospels”. Unfortunately, both of these camps of supporters and opponents often oscillate between opposing poles of fundamentalist rhetoric that tend to avoid the work of theological, philosophical, and scientific investigation that are required to helpfully and truly discuss the topic of faith in God.

However, there are some Christian theologians who have decided to take on the Atheist Gospels and do so without avoiding the work of such a task. David Bentley Hart has just recently release his book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, in which he argues that Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens, and Harris’s “Gospels” are essentially documents founded on “intuition” and “rhetoric” rather than a sensitive historical engagement with the Christian faith. Here is are two excerpts that I particularly enjoyed:

“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)

“…the extraordinary scientific, philosophical, and political ferment of the nineteenth century provided Christianity with enemies of unparalleled passion and visionary intensity. The greatest of them all, Fredrich Nietzsche, may have had a somewhat limited understanding of the history of Christian thought, but he was nevertheless a man of immense culture who could appreciate the magnitude of the thing against which he had turned his spirit, and who had enough sense of the past to understand the cultural crisis that the fading of the Christian faith would bring about. Moreover, he 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….By comparison to these men, today’s gadflies seem far lazier, less insightful, less subtle, less refined, more emotional, more ethically complacent, and far more interested in facile simplifications of history than in sober and demanding investigations of what Christianity has been or is.” (5, 6).

What I like about what Hart says here, especially in his comparison of the modern Atheists to Nietzsche, is that these modern Atheists tend to assume that the core of religion is violence and that the only salvageable component of the machine of religion, is this tendency to want to be nice to each other, which is kind of an incidental component of religion that we can perhaps appreciate. To make the statement that religion is at its core, violent, is to be ignorant of thousands of years of history in which human beings acted from the convictions of their faith to perform loving and admirable acts. To simply right these incidents out as incidental and fortunate variations on a system whose base is inherently violent is to assume an ignorace and historical totalitarianism that is itself violent. No doubt, Christian’s often engage in such ignorance as well, but this is just to say that they make the same mistake as the modern Atheists.

What do you think?

In this episode we talk about the concept of atonement. Was there a debt that was paid on the cross that Jesus died on? Was His death on the cross a symbol of mercy instead of a financial transaction? Was it also an act of selfishness? And why did Tom Green make a rap video?  Join us as we pour through these challenging but interesting topics.

Here are some show notes:

What is the doctrine of Atonement?

What assumptions are made about the death of Christ within such a doctrine? Biblically? (Rom. 3:21-26?), Theologically (Anselm: Curs Deus Homo – 1033-1109) Culturally & Historically? (Jewish Tradition, Ancient Traditions).

Sacrifice: Is it problematic (from a modern day ethical point of view, to understand Jesus’ death as a sacrifice? Is it problematic to our view of an omnipotent God?

What is the logic of sacrifice? Debt & Payment in order to fulfill a kind of cosmic economy?

What is the logic of gift? Self-Offering in spite of all economies. (Mat. 9:1-13)

Terms:

- Atonement/Sacrifice/Propitiation (Rom 3:25): Greek = hilasterion: meaning “means by which sins are forgiven”.

Links:

Google Book: http://cli.gs/MXRuzN

Tom Green Rap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ctc4daiIZU

Quoteable Quotes:

“God’s order is preserved through his own assumption of the conditions of estrangement; his mercy is imparted in the acceptance of Christ’s voluntary death; the highest law of God’s inviolable justice is boundless mercy; God’s sovereignty necessitates his condescension; the goodness that condemns the sinner requires that sin be forgiven. This is not because Anselm sees God as divided against himself: rather, he has come to see Christ’s sacrifice not as an economic gesture (meant to insure the stability of a universe foundd on unyielding laws of equivalence and retribution), but as belonging instead to the infinite motion of God’s love, in which justice and mercy are one and can never be divided one from the other; he has recognized Christ’s act as an infinite motion towards the Father, belonging to the myster of the Trinity, and simply surpassing all the arrangements of debt and violence by which a sinful humanity seeks to calculate its “justice”. — D.B. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 370-371.

“the contagion of merit and intercession, though it was still, and crucially, a trade of sorts, was an impossible and miraculous trade in the infinite, a seeking to restore, by all and for all, the repayments of a debt due which is nothing but an infinite free accepting. Just for this reason, Aquinas insisted that human forgiveness could not wait on a human penance which it could not, like divine forgiveness, guarantee; instead, forgiveness, as negative cancellationonly attained through positive enabling and substitutionary undergoing, had to be freely and infinitely offered without price to the neighbor, as the gospels demanded. Therefore forgiveness obeyed no ordinary, calculable economy, since it was without finite price.” John Milbank, Being Reconciled, pg. 47

This episode is 56 minutes long and you can listen to it here:

[podcast]http://unbelievablefaith.com/wp-content/audio/UFaithEp012.mp3[/podcast]

In this Gong Show episode we talk about what sexting is all about, the popular posesive attitude toward God, and we try to envision what it would be like to have been born Jesus.

Here as some Show Notes:

http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html

This show is one hour and 9 minutes long:

[podcast]http://unbelievablefaith.com/wp-content/audio/UFaithEp011.mp3[/podcast]

For those interested in thinking some more about the cross/resurrection:

An interview with Stanley Hauerwas, and a sermon by Kim Fabricius on Ben’s blog.

On the lighter side, here’s a very cool Lego Jesus:

Biblical: And The Lord Said, “Go Forth And Build Me With Modular Plastic Blocks” – Geekologie.

Since I posted the Rowan Williams quote and since we have had our podcast on the resurrection, I have been doing some more thinking about Easter and figured I would turn to Eastern Orthodox Theologian David Bentley Hart for some more wisdom. Here Hart explores what it might mean to reject the cross as the symbol which points us to a God whose primary mode of salvation is found in a sacrificial system that we can comprehend as producing a theoretical “resurrection” whose only meaning is found in an idea or in the mind’s meaning. Hart also then gives a counter reading on the resurrection that actually incorporates some Marxian critiques of humanity’s tendency to externalize. Hart uses this Marxian critique as a way of critiquing theology that frames ressurection as simply idea, and proceeds to then give his own quasi-Marxian defense of the bodily resurrection:

“Christian love erupts from the empty tomb, and so must always be in rebellion against all tragic “profundities”. Such considerations call even more severely into question Lash’s reading of the story of Easter as the communication, by the power of the Spirit, of Christ’s experience of transcendant “meaningfulness” in the midst of his sacrifice, his sense of the significance of his whole life as standing eternally in God’s light. There is before all else, a moral danger in Lash making Easter a secondary, speculative vantage upon what happened at Golgotha: it comes perilously close to placing his reading on the side of the pagan order of sacrifice and of its wisdom regarding the crucifixion (regarding every crucifixion). One should, first and foremost, be troubled by the way this reading makes knowledge and spiritual comfort the fruit of an annihilation of finite form; every theoretical recasting of violence is mactation, a sacrifice in the most elementary propitiatory sense. It requires a certain very refined, altogether exquisite sensibility to grasp the crucifixion in just this fashion: one must step back from the act of murder itself, enacting the partial withdrawl of theoria, to that place where truth never simply happens (as difference, as irreducible historical particularity), but where “Truth” is intuited as total light, something recollected. Such a reading invites not only Kierkegaard’s critique of contemplation’s aristocratic indolence, but the still more solvent critiques of both Nietzsche and Marx. On Lash’s reading the crucifixion becomes a spectacle in the Hegelian sense – with its convertibility between death and life, negation and spirit, death and wisdom — which means it is “true” only insofar as it has a speculative inner fold: the spectacle is always a speculum, the mirror whose specular reflex allows the self a contemplation of itself, a return to the self; and thus the crucifixion constitutes an act of speculation in the economic sense as well, which secures a return to the investment made in the surrender of the particular.” (The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 387-388).

In other words, Hart is pointing to a crucial tension in the Easter story: If Christ’s death be real, but his resurrection only an idea, then Christ is not significant in his particularity as the one who died in history and also was raised in history, then Christ must simply become the abstract idea or meaning of salvation, not salvation’s particular bodily, historical form. Hart continues:

“But theology is not permitted to make the cross a place of enlightenment, or to allow it its “spectacular” singularity, because the resurrection occurs as yet another event, in excess of the totality death bounds, and so upsets the tragic balance of the scene and leaves it in a state of dramatic undecidability: Is it a kind of ending or beginning? Does Christ on the cross affect history or succumb to history’s violences? Where can the cross be aesthetically placed, how can it be seen, when the blinding radiance of the next historical event (where Christ’s history would seem to have been exhausted) has so radically altered its deployment of shadows and light? Easter forces Christian reflection out of the depths of speculative solace and back to the surface of history. Christ’s resurrection transgresses the orderly metaphysics that makes negation a tragic or dialectical moment; for theology, then, the…crucifixion is never translated into contemplative repose (self, “meaningfulness”, eleos and phobos, Geist), because the serenity of every tragic representaiton has been disrupted by a sudden, unanticipated, inassimilable declaration of divine glory. Any attempt to reinterpret the resurrection as the speculative inner fold of the crucifixion is also an attempt to moderate the aesthetic affront of Easter, so that the crucifixion may still subserve a return to the self and the Same; but within the Gospel narratives themselves Christ’s resurrection is seen as calling us not to ourselves but beyond… (The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 389).

I think Hart wonderfully displays the danger to the particularity of the Christian faith if the resurrection is simply an idea. What do you think?

First off, this episode is not an attempt to offend people of the christian faith, or to take away from the value and significance people may place in the death/resurrection of Jesus. In this episode we try to walk through some of the modern challenges of believing in the resurrection.

Here are some of the show notes:

John Shelby Spong: “I do admit that for Christians to enter this subject honestly is to invite great anxiety. It is to walk the razor’s edge, to run the risk of cutting the final cord still binding many to the faith of their mothers and fathers. But the price for refusing to enter this consideration is for me even higher. The inability to question reveals that one has no confidence that one’s belief system will survive such an inquiry. That is a tacit recognition that on unconscious levels, one’s faith has already died. If one seeks to protect God from truth or new insights, then God has surely already died.”

-order of the books of the bible. first gospel written 23 years after Jesus death
-frustration with the Judaism not coming on board
-parallels with Egyptian gods like Osiris
-Why was the resurrection significant? Who was it significant to? Who benefited from the resurrection?

SPONG TIME Debates with Rowan Williams:
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/13880.htm

Barth: “We are powerless; we are lost. Death is the supreme law of our life. We can say no more than that if there be salvation, it must be salvation from death; if there be a ‘Yes’, it must be such a ‘Yes’ as will dissolve this last and final ‘No’; if there be a way of escape, it must pass through this terrible barrier by which we are confronted.” -pg.167, Epistle to the Romans.

This episode is one hour and three minutes:

[podcast]http://unbelievablefaith.com/wp-content/audio/UFaithEp010.mp3[/podcast]