Part 1:
Footnote
The new atheism fad of the 00s and lingering on even as its fashion has faded was good for religion, I think, in that it led many of us who weren't that well versed in theology to look again at the literature of intellectual engagement over God and the many lines of divergence within theology and religion. In many cases, especially in both poplar writing and rigid ideological and sectarian writing, the kind that gets the most attention from low and middle brow browsers and scribblers, that literature isn't very good and is quit unworthy of the topic. But at the high end, it is some of the most impressive intellectual engagement there is in Western or, in fact, any culture. A Reinhold Niebuhr, a Hans Kung from the first pages of reading them will instantly throw you in a deeper end than your typical modern, Western university level education will have made you comfortable in. Typically a fine theologian will make full use of an enormous range of research and analysis and documentation in a vast range of topics and will have read more books than just about any other professional in any other branch of scholarship. Even fine historians or philosophers will seldom make references, almost always with full citations and attributions, as wide as a good theologian will.
Back in the 00s, even before I'd started reading more theology than I had in my misspent youth and earlier adulthood, I was generally struck at the extremely low level of engagement with intellectual culture that was on display among the new atheists and even the older generation of ideological evangelical atheists, the CSICOP generation and its predecessors. In the course of my review of that literature, it was interesting to contrast the writing of some of the bright lights and even the legitimate intellectuals among them, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, adding to my youthful reading and early rejection of the existentialists and Marxists. I have noted here before that not only did the prominent theologians of those generations address and at times very skillfully and honestly eviscerate the arguments of a Dewey or a Russell, that it was far more often that the theologians would deal directly with the opposition in direct confrontation and on the same footing and very often they had the better arguments.
The same can't be said of their intellectual grand-kids, as it were, the generation of Dawkins and Dennett and, in turn, their spawn, the generation of Harris, Carroll, Coyne. None of them are intellectually prepared to directly confront the best of theology, which is probably why they try to remake the rules so they won't have to. You see, they have "science" on their side, they don't have to address their intellectual opponents pretending that when they are addressing theology they don't do so on the grounds of science which is entirely removed from the areas that theology covers by the conventional agreement of those who do legitimate science. Even a Daniel Dennett who, as a man who made his living doing philosophy, should know that distinction but Dennett was never that much of a philosopher, choosing to be a groupie of scientism when any philosopher worthy of drawing a paycheck as such should have the chops to know that scientism is an absurd and self-contradicting position which is, itself, not a scientifically testable idea and so self-refuting.
The new atheism was, I concluded, a symptom of the general decay of intellectual culture under the influences of modernist nihilism and, more importantly, the damage done by bringing the worst forms of mass media in to dominate the time and so lives of the general population. It was an appeal made by the intellectual lightweight to those who were unprepared for anything better, that so many of the ones who took to it had university credentials shows how bad that intellectual decay is - I know, I have struggled with it my entire adulthood, many others never thought to struggle. I was never so far gone that I didn't realize that atheism is an intellectually vapid position but I did take the cowards way out in agnosticism, an eternal refusal to make a choice, the intellectual equivalent of a non-voter who refuses to take responsibility to try to do something to make life better.
As the passage I started giving you yesterday continues, Hans Kung addresses some of the general attacks by enlightenment era anti-Christian criticism, going back to a time when the critics of Christianity did so from an intellectual foundation instead of with the tactics of public relations and advertising.
Psychology can explain a great deal in the world, but not everything. Nor do the prevailing conditions explain everything. In any case, if we want to interpret psychologically the initial stages of Christianity, we may not merely presume, postulate, work out ingenious hypotheses, [a fault of the historical-critical way of using the Bible, in far too many cases] but we must consult without prejudice those who initiated the movement and whose most important testimonies have been preserved for us. Fro the latter it becomes clear that this Passion story with its disastrous outcome - why should it ever have entered into the memory of mankind? - was transmitted only because there was also an Easter story which made the Passion story (and the story of the action lying behind it) appear in a completely different light.
But, far from ceasing, the difficulties only really begin at this point. For if someone wants to accept what are known as the resurrection or Easter stories literally with simple faith, instead of trying to find a psychological explanation, that will not be the end of it. A little reflection, any kind of reasoning, will bring him up against almost unsurmountable obstacles. Historical-critical exegesis only increases the embarrassment, as it has done ever since the most acute polemicist of classical German literature - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - two hundred years ago brought to the notice of a bewildered public those "Fragments by an Anonymous Person (the Hamburg rationalist H. S. Riemarus, died 1768) among which were "The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples" and "Concerning the Story of the Resurrection." If, as men of the twentieth century, we want to believe in some sort of resurrection not only halfheartedly, with a bad conscience, but honestly and with conviction, the difficulties must be faced squarely and without prejudices of faith or unbelief. But it is just at this point that the reverse side of the difficulty is revealed. There are surmountable difficulties.
First difficulty, What is true of the Gospels as a whole is particularly true of the Easter stories; they are not unbiased reports by disinterested observers but depositions in favor of Jesus submitted in faith by supremely interested and committed persons. They are therefore not so much historical as theological documents; not records of proceedings or chronicles, but testimonies of faith. The Easter faith, which characterized the whole Jesus tradition from the very beginning, obviously determined also the Easter accounts themselves, thus creating extraordinary difficulties from the star for a historical scrutiny. It is in the Easter stories that we must ask about the Easter message.
The reverse side of this difficulty is that this is the very way in which the central importance of the Easter faith to primitive Christendom becomes clear. At least for primitive Christendom, Christian faith stands or falls iwth the evidence of Jesus' resurrection, without which there is no content to Christian preaching or even faith. Thus Easter appears - opportunely or inopportunely - not only as the basic unit, but also as the permanent, constitutive core of the Christian creed. Even the earliest brief Christological formulas in Paul's letters, if they amount to more than a title, are concentrated on Jesus' death and resurrection.
It was certainly not something which the earliest Christians were unaware of that their claim that Jesus, a disgraced, executed criminal (the disdainful description of him that the arrogant, elite Roman intellectual Tacitus left as independent evidence of the reality of Jesus*) was raised from the dead by God, that he, in a new body recognizable by the wounds of crucifixion but also different enough so that his closest followers sometimes didn't know it was him until he let them know it, the very people who gave the account of the crucifixion and Resurrection knew that other people would find these very stories unbelievable or at least very hard to believe.
The difficulty raised, that it was interested parties who told the stories is certainly not considered an impediment in most other areas of discourse. History is always told in documents left by the parties involved or who, if an observer and not an actor, almost always have a partial point of view.
The ideal of the "objective observer" who is not only gifted with having no predisposition or prejudice BUT IS ALSO GIFTED WITH AN ENHANCED OBSERVATIONAL, ANALYTICAL AND REPORTORIAL ACCRUACY SUPERIOR TO OTHERS is a myth. Such "objective" observation doesn't exist. That is something which Lessing or Reimarus may not have known in the 18th century, it is certainly something which we not only know today but which the hardest science made into one of the most astute and important of discoveries in the 20th century. Not that the culture of science or the general culture of modern scientism has caught up to it.
I doubt there is a more credible example to turn to in this than Paul who, by his own confession was a zealous opponent of the earliest followers of Jesus after the Resurrection and whose intellect and astute analytical powers are documented in Romans and his other authentic letters. And, as Kung notes, the very story marked as not-credible by those who scoff and deny, something which, no doubt Paul not only encountered after his conversion but was probably one of before his conversion, was given by him as the central belief which distinguishes a follower of Jesus from a non-follower.
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
1 Corinthians 1: 19-31
I think the method of Biblical criticism that looks for things you would never expect an avid promoter of faith to have put in their scriptures is one of the more convincing methods. I find the Hebrew-Christian habit of putting some of the most shameful parts of their history and claims into their scriptures to be some of the most convincing aspects of it, they certainly knew their enemies would use their own confessions against them. The Bible is not a royal road to faith, it is hard and difficult and, when read honestly, the very kind of stumbling block that Paul talked about.
If Paul, who, after all, for subsequent Christians is the one who defines what the basic definition of a Christian is, wanted to make it easier to believe, he would certainly have either emphasized other aspects of the teaching and life of Jesus than the hardest to believe or would have left that out altogether. But he didn't. He gave the very thing that was most scandalous about Jesus, his conviction and execution as a criminal, a story which shows his foremost followers - apart from the women - in the worst light, the most incredible of all, his Resurrection, as the defining belief that a Christian had to hold to be a Christian. The very things that Tacitus gave to sneeringly disdain the Christians.
Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.
I will note that even though there have been a few scholars who claim that this passage in Tacitus is a later Christian interpolation, a claim which is weakened by the tone against Jesus and Christianity contained in it, modern scholars, even those who are ready to find whatever they can to dismiss or debunk Christianity today take it as an authentic text from Tacitus. As I probably should have continued above, the game of dismissing what gets said based on the ideological interests of those saying it is most stringently played against those who are well disposed toward religion, most stringently against Christians but also against Jewish scholars, Islamic scholars, etc. It is a standard which those with a predisposition against religion are seldom held up against. But theologians, certainly the best of them and many of those who are average to good constantly present and address the arguments of their opponents in a way that the would-be debunkers seldom address, in my experience. The new atheists, unable to deal with that level of intellectual engagement never have in my experience of engaging with even some of the more famous of them online, Carroll and Coyne, not to mention the likes of PZ Myers.
I will continue with the difficulties that Hans Kung addressed later.
Update: Hate Mail
Oh, that old saw about Paul not being literate and dictating his letters. First, I tend to doubt it. I would expect that as a self-professed Pharisee, Paul would have stood a better than average chance of being literate.
But even if he were illiterate or not a writer the letters bearing his name, especially the ones that modern scholars agree are authentic would prove that as a non-reader-writer, Paul must have had an even more impressive mind. To be able to compose something like 1 Corinthians or Romans without recourse of a number of rough drafts doesn't constitute a lesser intellectual achievement but a far greater one. I can't even write these little posts without going through drafts.
The criticisms of Paul that are legitimate, SOME of what he said about slavery, SOME of what he said about women is due to him dealing with the practical, day-to-day problems within the communities he had helped get established among former-pagans who, certainly, were not uniformly able to give up even some of the most morally abominable practices common to Mediterranean pagan cultures - especially things like the temple prostituting of children and the ubiquitous practice of slavery - but also dealing with the patriarchal, sexist social norms that were certainly ingrained in even many of those who had been converted. His advice to the slave to return to his master was in the context of the master treating him as an equal, as a brother as opposed to as a slave would be treated in Roman dominated societies. His advice to how women should act - the response which by the women in those cities we don't know, as Elizabeth A. Johnson has pointed out - is matched by his totally atypical presentation of women as his equals in discipleship and authority, something which was probably unheard of in Rome and Corinth and elsewhere. Paul is one of the most interestingly complex figures in the classical period, a person of contradictions whose complications can't be understood except within the context in which he operated. As the great scholar Susannah Heschel noted, a huge part of understanding Paul is taking his own personality as it comes through in his writing into account. He certainly couldn't have been an easy person to live with, he was certainly headstrong - as Heschel says, it's no wonder he wasn't married - but he was certainly sincere in his conversion after his experience of the Crucified one as a living being.
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