Your God is Too Small

“We may here point out the great difference that has come to exist between the Christianity of the early days and that of today. To us it has become a performance, a keeping of rules, while to the men of those days it was, plainly, an invasion of their lives by a new quality of life altogether.”

- J. B. Phillips, Your God Is Too Small
(Quote courtesy of Charles Gaston)

Richard Dawkins Quote and Some Thoughts

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!
- Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene and other secular atheist books)

Well, I have a couple of things to say about that. Now, I get into trouble when I comment on world authorities because a lot of times, I think I am a world authority. It usually follows in a painful way that I am not. In one case, I was actually trying to debate with Jimmy Dunn (the man who brought the New Perspective on Paul to conservative Christianity). What resulted was pretty messy and embarrassing from my perspective. In the middle of the conversation, I decided that what I needed was a nice, hot cup of shut the **** up. Hopefully, I will never forget that experience.

Anyway, I do want to say a couple of things about the Dawkins quote. First of all, I can sympathize with him on one score. Not necessarily agree, but sympathize. He said religion was dangerous because it "gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness." Well, Alister McGrath apparently criticized Dawkins because he did not believe that he had an adequate understanding of the teaching of Christianity. I agree with that criticism. Dawkins does not have an adequate understanding of the Christian message.

Neither do almost all Christians. When ethics are emphasized and the entire reason for Christian faith becomes inherent righteousness and self-improvement, the end result happens to be Christians who place confidence in their own righteousness. In that respect, I can certainly see Dawkins's complaint.

What he misses is the radical and totally "sub contrario" nature of what Christianity has to say. I am sad to say that Christendom misses the whole thing, too. Christianity teaches that human beings are radically unrighteous and totally depraved. It teaches that, because of the Fall, mankind is made up of beggars who totally forsake God and one another for the pursuit of empty temporal power and sexual conquest. God then became flesh in Christ to atone for our sin and reconcile us to our Maker (without our permission, by the way). Would that Christian ministers would preach this! Would that Christian people would understand this!

This is totally opposite of every other religion that ever existed. All of the rest are totally based on Law (karma, merit, or whatever). "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps." "You are the sum of your actions." "You have a right to have a Big Mac, etc." Christianity flies in the face of this morbidly normal way of thinking. It is also totally opposite to the "survival of the fittest" mentality of secular-sort-of-nihilist-types.

Another thing I want to say is a more direct challenge to Dawkins himself. It is disappointing that he is either intellectually lazy or rabidly myopic enough to say that religion is the cause of evil in the world. That is, unless he is willing to admit that secular atheism is a religion just like all other beliefs (which he very well may be). If anyone has read A Tale of Two Cities or anything about the Reign of Terror, one will see the result of zealous worship of reason. One can also take a look at Nazi Germany and see the result of "triumph of the will"-style nihilism or Stalinist Russia for the same thing (millions of dead later). Pol Pot would be another good one to look at (see Killing Fields). All of this is to say that human being and their institutions are the source of evil (with help from the devil), regardless of how that manifests itself. That is, if you can actually define "evil" without God.

Dawkins is obsessed and mistaken.

He makes a good point, though. Christendom has lost the gospel.

Forde Quote

“Symptoms of such deadly sin can be detected in the very midst of our piety when complaint is unthinkingly launched against the ‘cheapness’ of grace, or the fear that it leads too readily to moral laxity, permissiveness, and so forth. These are words that bespeak trust in the apparent goodness of human works and distrust in the power of divine grace. Thus they cut the sinner off from God—deadly sin!”

- Gerhard Forde

Are You Experienced?

Our Dean, Frank Limehouse, preached a great sermon this Sunday on objective truth vs. subjective experience. The text was 2 Peter 1:13-21. He spoke about how little satisfaction there is in a Christian offering himself (and his changed life) up as proof of the existence of God. Christianity is based on historical facts, eyewitness accounts, and objective truth.

This line of thinking led me to another train of thought. Now, my seminary friends pretty much know that I do not waste a lot of thought on the revisionist side of the Episcopal Church. It’s just not worth spending a lot of time on because these folks have drilled a hole in the bottom of their boat and it is sinking (slowly because of their massive endowments). I am much more interested in the doctrine of man and justification by faith as it is taught by Scripture. I will break with this pattern just this once on this little entry.

It is astounding to me that the new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church can sit there and say that there is no proof for the divinity of Christ, His exclusive claims, the authority of Scripture, and the like. Then she (an oceanographer, a scientist!) can trot out and pray to the mother goddess! Don’t tell me “mother Jesus” and the “mother goddess” are not the same thing. If you think I am overreacting, go look at the communion service ECUSA put up a couple of years ago to celebrate said mother goddess. Reason has been replaced by experience on the revisionist side (there is no reason whatsoever in believing in a mother goddess or the “spirit of the deep river” as the Bishop of California likes to say). Where does this come from?

In his Dean’s Class Sunday, Frank correctly pointed out that Friedrich Schleiermacher is the father of all this nonsense. He was heavily influenced by the thinking (or feeling, rather) of the Romantic period. The people we normally associate with this school of thought are Emerson, Thoreau, and Rousseau. They basically threw out orthodox Christianity for the worship of nature (more or less). Rousseau was famous for rowing his boat out in the middle of a lake and announcing, “Nature is my god.” He was obviously struck by the beauty and majesty of nature in appearance and experience. The same goes for Emerson and Thoreau in different ways.

Now what Rousseau either did not realize or chose to gloss over was that right below him in the lake, a largemouth bass was eating a small, defenseless minnow alive. I guarantee you that little minnow was not saying, “Nature is my god” at that moment. He was too busy being digested. Now, what am I saying? Here is one more piece of information to chew on. One thing the Romantics/revisionists will not tell you is that the Marquis de Sade was also a Romantic. Wow! The Marquis de Sade certainly didn’t make the film “Dead Poets Society” (which I liked, by the way). Why not? It is because that is the other side of nature. That is the dominant side of nature, if you will. Yes, nature is beautiful. It is also “raven with tooth and claw” (to quote Les Fairfield who was quoting someone else) and seeks to devour in order to stay alive. Yes, a sunset on the beach is beautiful. Jump in the water about three miles out and there will be an animal three times your size that would be happy to eat you.

Karl Barth realized this when he made his conversion from liberalism to orthodoxy. His liberal theology had no answer for the bloodletting that was World War I. Orthodox Christianity does. We are fallen people in a fallen world, following the devices of our own “belly” (as Martin Luther said). In order to project ourselves, we trample over each other and then find out it was all in vain. We need a new creation. We need to be a new creation. We need a savior.