Where’s Your Bloody Horse?
New York magazine has a done a number on the “new” atheism. This little piece is filled with fascinating tidbits that make those “crazy” fundamentalists who believe in the resurrection look, well, not so crazy. Take, for example, atheistic believer Tim Gorski, who claims that church isn’t about “specific doctrines” but about binding people together. Even though Gorski claims that church does not bring people together according to doctrinal distinctives, he describes atheistic church as using certain scientific beliefs to motivate members of the congregation:
“Every service is different,” says Gorski. “For example, we created a serial feature called ‘Moment of Science,’ where we look at something recent or not so recent but something from science that informs our everyday experience. Economists tell us that if our neighbors live in nicer houses, we’re unhappy. We share this with members, so that next time they’re unhappy, they can think about why and hopefully change that.”
Two things: (1) showing people scientific news as though it were divine revelation is not a lack of doctrine, but is actually quite doctrinal; and (2) you don’t need a bunch of economists to tell your congregation that jealousy is to be avoided. (Can we call that plagiarism?)
Yes, it’s finally happening: atheist orthodoxy. One of the fundamentals, it seems, is the claim that God is totally unknown and unknowable. Take the a-theizing of Judaism by Peter Schweitzer, who took a red pen to the thought of “God” to create a “secular worship service”:
Schweitzer tells me that Humanistic Judaism was founded in the early sixties by a former Reform rabbi from Michigan named Sherwin Wine. Wine, Schweitzer explains, coined the term ignostic—you’re never going to know what God is, so why waste your time worrying about it? “God is a construct of the mind,” he says.
But, again, you don’t have to scratch out the thought of God from your worship bulletin if your thought of God includes God’s inscrutability and his hatred of cheap imitations of the real thing.
It’s hard to say what’s better than a bunch of atheists unwittingly clamoring for the Ten Commandments. But it does get better. Just when you thought the postmodern crew would come to the rescue of the likes of a “humanistic” Judaism born in the 60’s by crying out for more relativism, the lively George Steiner gets an interview:
Steiner doesn’t believe “there can be a Hamlet without a ghost, a Missa Solemnis without a missa”, and if you say that the questions addressed by religion are “nonsense or baby talk or trivial, I don’t believe that certain dimensions will be available to you. Particularly today, when the atheist case is being put, if I may say so, with such vulgarity of mind.” Most writing “seems to me too often, in this country, at the moment, a minimalist art. Very, very non-risk-taking. Very tight - often admirably, technically. But finally one thinks of the nasty taunt of Roy Campbell, the South African rightwing poet: I see your bridle, where’s the bloody horse?”
It becomes quickly apparent that many forms of atheism are “very, very non-risk-taking.” Richard Dawkins considers himself a militia man in the “war against supernaturalism.” But when you believe that God is an impossibility, it becomes altogether too easy to be an atheist. There are no risks in criticizing a “god” who is little more than a combination of bad experiences with religionists or a fabrication of cultural imagination. But God is more than that — so much more, in fact, that God did the last thing any human being would readily imagine him doing: he died on a cross. The supernatural became quite natural so that the naturalists could get a grip on him. But he was still true God from true God, true light from true light, which we know because he didn’t just die, but he was raised from the dead. Because of that, we can say that we do know who God is (i.e., love), and such speaking just is the Christian Gospel. In our Church, God has created a serial feature called “Preaching the Gospel,” where we look at someone recent or not so recent but someone from God who informs our everyday experience: Jesus Christ.