Eyre Lines

Looking at Merold Westphal’s writing on “Atheism for Lent” in his book “Suspicion and Faith” for Pete Rollins 2020 Atheism for Lent, I start by being put off by Westphal talking of Freud, Niezsche and Marx as the great modern theologians of original sin; original sin is not a term which I’m fond of, particularly given that it’s very Augustinian, and Augustine seems to have been the originator of the Church’s preoccupation with sex, which these days seems to be just about all the Church really IS concerned with (given that “pro-life”, i.e. anti-abortion, is really anti-sex in its deepest motivation). I don’t myself like to talk of the yetzer ha ra (evil inclination) without also talking of the yetzer ha tov (inclination toward good), thinking that the Jewish theologians did a much better job of interpreting their own scriptures, and that Christians should have left well alone – at least on that point. I do have an idea of something “original”, but it’s original self-consciousness (and so self-centeredness).

The trouble is, just when I’d decided not to like his writing, Westphal then suggests that those three are useful as critics of Christianity, and with that I thoroughly agree. If “the unexamined life is not worth living”, then probably the unexamined faith is not worth having – or, considering that the NT usage is of a verb form, not worth faithing. I’m still comfortable when he points out that all three cast doubt on the utility of substance-dualism, and suggest that religion can be a very material, fleshly thing. What else, indeed, can it be, when metaphysics is relegated by Kant to the sphere of unfounded conjecture (as I interpret him as saying, but then, I don’t claim to understand Kant).

Then, however, Westphal is straight back into “all our righteous deeds are but as dirty rags” and “the heart is deceitful in all things, and desperately corrupt”, and quoting Karl Barth stating that it was not the world which crucified Jesus, but the church. Forgive me, but it was not the church. It wasn’t even the Jewish Temple hierarchy, which I imagine Barth considered to be place-holders for the church. It was the Romans, and they were most definitely the worldly power, and, if we believe Matthew, it was also the mob – empire and hoi polloi conjoined, which is pretty definitely the world. I will grant that in those days the concept of separating church and state was well over a millennium away, and would have meant almost nothing to any faction in the first century, and that one of the issues the Romans obviously had with Jesus was total incomprehension of “my kingdom is not of this world”. Where else could it be? They had the same issue with later followers of Jesus proclaiming “Jesus is Lord”, because, by implication, that meant that Caesar was not Lord. In that day and age, heresy was also treason – and continued to be through the history of the Empire and then of Christendom until at least the Reformation. Let’s be honest, it continues to this day – Catholics have only fairly recently started becoming more accepted because of their allegiance to the Pope, Jews are still attacked for the deeds of the Israeli Government and suspected of split loyalties, and Muslims have to carry the burden of a few of their more extreme adherents – in a way in which, I note, Christians don’t have to carry the burden of some of theirs (for example, the Lords Resistance Army).

Later, however, it becomes clear that Barth was laying the blame at the feet of the church at least in part to avoid it being cast on the Romans or the Jews (because we are not Romans or Jews), so we could accept the blame. In conscience, I think we can do that without this somewhat ahistorical exercise – Christians think of themselves as “grafted on” to the stem of Judaism, so we cannot take the benefit without the burden there, and most Western Christians are the children of Empire, whether it be the English-speaking British and then American empires or the competing ones of the Spanish, Portuguese, French or Dutch. Even the Belgians had their stab at empire in the Congo, and the Italians in Eritrea; the Scandinavians need to look a little further back to Vasa and Vikings… though perhaps the Swiss are exempt.

Westphal, however, then turns in a direction more congenial to me, in using Barth’s criticism of Christianity as transactional, using the example of Salieri from the play and film “Amadeus”; it is all about what God can do for us, apparently. One might more profitably think in terms of “ask not what your God can do for you, but what you can do for your God”. Jesus, after all, said “take up your cross and follow me”; we are not looking there at a transaction, but an exhortation, and one which leads to a death similar to that of Jesus (something which was familiar to several generations of early Christians, but entirely foreign to most today). Paul wrote “I have been crucified with Christ” – he hadn’t, in the strict sense, but in extra-scriptural writing, it seems he eventually achieved that. I think it right that, as Lent points us inevitably to the cross, so we should orient ourselves that way in advance.

One further thought came to me in contemplating this passage in a somewhat cruciform frame of mind, and that was that the stress on challenging our notions of God is very appropriate. I’m a mystic; I rest what faith I can manage (what faithing I can achieve) on a number of powerful mystical experiences, and we’ll come to that a couple of weeks hence. Pete rightly identifies the mystics as criticising any too-definite statement about God, and I have to agree that that is a characteristic of mystics reporting their experience; the words we have, the concepts we have, are inadequate to convey the fullness of that experience of God. The generality is to affirm something about God but immediately to negate it, the cataphatic way (way of denial), and the image which comes to me is that every time we make a definite statement about God, we are trying to pin God down to some specific definition (I wrote a whole post about this, the title of which “The heresy of all doctrines” prompted someone to ask if I’d encountered Pete Rollins work, as it was reminiscent of some of this titles – I hadn’t, but here I am embarking on a fourth dose of Atheism for Lent).

Pinning God down could be a description of the crucifixion…