Handicap

Only reference critics who make no overt claim to be themselves religious. This is a self-imposed restriction believers might employ when refuting the New Atheism; otherwise there's no sport in it. Call it something like a golf handicap.

The rule leaves one with an impressive tally of publications. I've already mentioned the Marxist Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books and biologist H. Allan Orr in the New York Review of Books. Now there's Leon Wieseltier in the The New Republic:

There are many things that may be said against contemporary atheism--against its dogmatism, its self-satisfaction, its evasion of the vast history of godless violence, its philosophical shallowness (when our Filene's Basement Voltaires bother about philosophical argument at all); but I am increasingly struck by the extent to which many of the books against God are mainly psychological expressions. More specifically, a lot of atheism looks to me like just a lot of adolescence. They are always telling you about their parents. They rebel against the false idea that God is the father because they have the false idea that their father is God. (Sometimes the villainous deceiver of young minds who must be deposed is an early teacher, who unaccountably failed to assign Why I Am Not a Christian to the second grade.) When it comes to the articulation of one's view of the world, of one's understanding of what is true and false about the universe, who cares what one's parents believe? The answer is, children care; and there is something childish about the freethinker's pouting critique of his own childhood. Atheism can be as infantilizing as theism, an inverted form of captivity to one's origins, as if biological authority confers intellectual authority. Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese. In matters of conviction, we are orphans. And there is also, of course, the boyish thrill of naughtiness, the titillation of sinning, that attends the witticisms against religion. Here is Anatole France on Baudelaire, by way of Edmund Wilson: "In his arrogance he wished to believe that everything he did was important, even his little impurities; so that he wanted them all to be sins that would interest heaven and hell." Religion may confer a preposterous cosmic significance upon the individual, but atheism is the true friend of egotism.

Reading this is like getting up to do the dishes, and finding they're already done.

update: And here's Wieseltier's review of what he calls that "merry anthology of contemporary superstitions," Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell.

new website

Form some time, with the help of the wonderful folks at the Educational Technologies Center, I've been working on a new website that explores Princeton's most magnificent Chapel. The Office of Religious Life has just put it up.

The most interesting features are here - a printable PDF and four part history-packed mp3 tour, which can be download onto one of them there fancy new-fangled "i-pod" devices.

And here is the tour itself with lots of images awaiting clicks. Considering our most recent discussion, I should mention that the Chapel's Milbank Choir with its four epics is - I will think until convinced otherwise - the finest ecumenical chapel in the world.

If you notice glitches, please email me.

Touchstone forum

For a thoughtful series of responses to the question, "What would you say to an Evangelical tempted to become Catholic or Orthodox?", scroll down just over halfway in the Evangelicalism Today forum of this month's Touchstone.

It's good to know such a crucial question is again being seriously addressed. My favorite line: "Start with the gospel. The gospel creates and sustains the church, not the other way around."

update: On a related not, a friend passes along this news from Ravenna - a significant first step towards Orthodox/Catholic unity (of which there have been many).

Run Rabbit Run

Consider Avery Cardinal Dulles' fine article, Saving Ecumenism from Itself. Clearly the Cardinal reads millinerd, because he begins - following the last sentence of a recent post - by admitting that

Catholic ecumenists, like their Orthodox colleagues, were conscious that their participation in the ecumenical movement was in some ways problematic because of the claims of their own Church to possess all the means of salvation entrusted by the Lord to his Church.

What follows is a chronicle of recent turns in the ecumenical movement. "The honeymoon is over" seems to sum up the new ethos, as respective communions swing from lowest common denominator engagement back to their confessional distinctives. Also following millinerd (see #2), Dulles admits that apologetics in these matters is secondary, because "testimony operates by a different logic." What puzzles me, however, is Dulles' suggestion that the next level of ecumenism is one of mutual gift giving, that we might "contribute something positive the the others still lack."

But, with Christmas shopping season upon us, I think it fair to ask: What do you get for the church that has everything?

In one of Aesop's fables a dog chasing a rabbit was outrun. When mocked by a goat-herder, the rabbit-chasing dog replied, "I was only running for a dinner, but he for his life." When it comes to ecumenism, Protestants are not running for dinner.

Older Ruins

There is a rather haunting and, at moments, beautiful piece in the current Commentary by R.R. Reno. He met Juliana, his Jewish wife, at Yale - where the power of American liberalism is acute.

It is like a cultural neutron bomb: the structures of ethnic and religious culture are left standing, but they are emptied of life.

And so, a Christian marrying a Jew was painful, but possible. Then however, his wife decides to get serious. He considers her new commitment and its transmission to their children.

Now I was to learn what it meant to be a resident alien in my own kitchen, an onlooker and supporter of her determined decision to burrow into the encompassing world of God's commandments.

He then contrasts it to his own lack of discipleship and that of his ever accommodating Episcopal church (since departed).

Not only had my church rejected the need to mark the body with the knife of circumcision, it had rejected the very idea that God's commandments can shape or control how we used our bodies. Nothing needs to be submitted to God other than the fine sentiments of the heart.

Reno's conversion to Catholicism may have alleviated the pains of Protestant-Catholic division, but he lives with the pain of that much earlier - and because Christ is indeed the Messiah - all the more awful division in the people of God. But the pain teaches, for it is carried in love. One gets the sense that any meditation on the division of God's people unaccompanied by such grief is deficient.

What a friend we have in Sociology

For charting world religion, this is indeed a fascinating map. Why Russia goes Christian about ten centuries late puzzles me, but who am I to quibble? The Middle East one is nice as well.

I imagine some view such things and think, "How can a given religion be true when it's historically and sociologically explicable?" Then there's sociologist Peter Berger. Countless are those dusty religion books from the 60's, discharged from that retired pastor's library to be picked up for a pittance at the Seminary book sale. Most, having passionately accommodated themselves to a bygone mindset, are no longer worth the paper they're printed on. Peter Berger's A Rumor of Angels (1969), however, is different.

Berger ruminates on the feline characteristics of theology - it just keeps living. Science was supposed to kill it. It lived. Then German historical thought was supposed to kill theology by picking apart the Bible. We made it through. Punning on the word Feuerbach, Marx insisted that all theology must go through the "fiery brook" of Feuerbachian thought. I think we're doing okay (read Barth's preface to Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity). Surely Freudian psychology would explain theology away. Still here. Berger suggests that the new "fiery brook" is sociology, and the threat of its critique is such than many believers instinctually avoid it. Much stronger than previous assaults, sociology "raises the vertigo of relativity to its most furious pitch." But, Berger explains,

when everything has been subsumed under the relativizing categories in question (those of history, of the sociology of knowledge, or what-have-you), the question of truth reasserts itself in almost pristine simplicity. Once we know that all human affirmations are subject to scientifically graspable socio-historical processes, which affirmations are true and which are false?... We are still left with the question of whether, possibly, both angels and demons go on existing despite the incapacity of our contemporaries to conceive of them.

Berger also takes a swipe at those coasters - I mean books - from the retired pastor's library.

The world view of the New Testament writers was constructed and maintained by the same kind of social processes that construct and maintain the world view of contemporary "radical" theologians. Each has its appropriate plausibility structures, its plausibility-maintaining mechanism. If this is understood, then the appeal to any alleged modern consciousness loses most of its persuasiveness - unless, of course, one can bring oneself to believe that modern consciousness is indeed the embodiment of superior cognitive powers... [but] one has the terrible suspicion that the Apostle Paul may have been one-up cognitively, after all.

Philip Bess, to whom I'm indebted for introducing me to Berger, summarizes his thought in this way: "Ideas do not succeed in history according to their truth but rather according to their relationship to specific kinds of social structures and processes." While this might initially put a believer on the defensive, it's actually liberating. Christianity's still significant lead amongst world religions is not an automatic verification, but nor is secularization proof of Christianity's falsehood, nor does Islam's quick expansion or Hinduism's antiquity authenticate Muslim or Hindu claims. All ideas are somewhat sociologically determined - theism, atheism, agnosticism - once we realize this we are freed to judge them as best we can on their truth value, not on their sociological success. In this, by the way, the Holy Spirit is of great assistance.