On a sermon at Duke University chapel
Guest post by Eric MacDonald
Take the point that he makes just at the end, where he speaks of Jeremiah’s idea of god making constant adaptations. He speaks of the vessel broken in the potter’s hands, and then he says this:
This is the story of Israel: the vessel was broken, the covenant was spoiled, and God made something beautiful by fashioning it into a pot shaped around the Jew named Jesus.
Notice how he simply runs the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Jesus together, without acknowledging the theft, without even acknowledging that Jesus has nothing to do with Jeremiah’s potter, nor with the story of Israel. That was a Christian structure built on Jewish foundations, a clear act of plagiarism.
But then he goes on in the same arrogant vein to say:
This is your story. Your life was spoiled, your pot was cracked, your hopes were broken, your plans were ruined; and God the potter made something that could never have been out of something that should never have been.
No, I can tell Dr. Wells my story. My story is of a life that was spoiled and hopes that were broken and plans ruined, not by acts of sinfulness, but by the capriciousness of life, the contigency of our brief and uncertain stay. And if a god is in charge of this, then he made something that should never have been out of something that could have been.
Just one more quote:
In science Christians can find a pattern, and a logic, with analogies and parallels to the very purpose of God. They can see depth, and complexity, and diversity, and simplicity, that together reflect the activity and character of God.
This is all fantasy, of course. But let me respond to these words with the anguished words of C.S. Lewis. Not many people quote these words, because they believe that Lewis took them all back at the end of the book. But you can’t take words like these back. Of course, he does wave his magic wand around, and supposes that he has solved the problem, but you can’t solve problems like this with magic wands. There is no magic, and Lewis was not a magician, despite The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
The book is A Grief Observed. Lewis’ wife had just died in great pain. She had cancer of the bone. He asks himself the question:
Why should the separation [of lover and beloved] … which so agonizes the lover who is left behind be painless to the lover who departs? ¶ ‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God.
It’s Epicurus’ old conundrum, of course. But Lewis doesn’t solve it. He makes it clearer. If pain here is consistent with God’s love, then there can be no guarantee that, if we go to be with God, there will be no more pain there. God’s goodness is consistent with it after all. That’s the way that evidence works. That’s the way that science uses evidence. Dr. Wells doesn’t get to use it in a different way. If the character of God is shown, as Wells says, in the world that science reveals to us, then God is as cruel and capricious as the world is. It’s just that simple, and if he can’t see that, then he doesn’t understand it either.
In fact, the world without science is crueller and much more uncertain. It was not God’s intervention that made things better. Things only started to get better, and then, of course, only relatively better, when science began to unlock the secrets of the natural world. To suppose that there is any useful relationship between religion and science is a simple dream, a theological fantasy.
That’s why Wells’ comment about the arts and philosophy is so silly. Whereas theology certainly has no foundation, philosophy and literature and the arts do. Wells simply misunderstands the scientific critique of religion. Science doesn’t dismiss the arts or philosophy or so many other things that enrich human life. These things can be dealt with critically. We can seek to understand how and why music or literature or poetry moves us and makes us more fully human, and there are critical disciplines which address themselves to these questions. But religion is the one thing that has no critical basis, nothing that we can point to, nothing that we can use to give it determinate shape and meaning. Religious literature or music or architecture can be enjoyed. We can analyse it and assess its value and profundity. But religion itself is mere froth on the surface of the beautiful things that religious people have created. They are human things, like novels and poems, plays and movies, symphonies and concertos, and they play a part in the cultural life of human beings.
But the religious part of religion is empty. There is no god, and no gods. These were just imaginary beings created to account for the wonder of being alive in the flesh and conscious. So, Wells is right. We do want to expose religion’s pretences and its follies. It has no place at the university, except in so far as it can be studied scientifically, as a comparative anthropological or historical study, or in so much as it can be explained by psychology and cognitive science. Anyone who preaches such nonsense at a university should expect to be exposed for the charlatan that he so obviously is.
Eric – it looks like quite a few paragraphs were lost at the top. Care to fill us in on what you’re talking about, who ‘he’ is and what’s happening?
This, of course, was a note to Ophelia’s post about Dr. Sam Wells’ sermon at Duke, which you can read in lurid detail here.
. The point that he makes at the end, is, as the beginning of my ‘guest post’ has it, is about Jeremiah’s metaphor of the potter and the clay. And then it runs on pretty clearly from there. Thanks to Ophelia for highlighting my little contribution to the conversation. I’ve been away all day and just got home.
Just one paragraph, which I omitted because it was specific to the post; I thought with the title the rest would be clear enough; sorry if it wasn’t.
I grew up Jewish. I don’t recall any such message being taught in Hebrew School, strangely enough. But I am glad that Dr Wells’ God was able to salvage something from the ugly, broken, rotten Jews and miraculously make something beautiful out of it. Nothing (antisemitic) to see here, folks, keep moving along. Yikes.
Yes, Gingerbaker, though I didn’t grow up Jewish, this is precisely my own take on Wells’ patentlly antisemitic addendum to Jeremiah. But Christians do this reflexively. Its deeply embedded in the Christian story, and Wells, I am sure, didn’t even realise that he had done it.
Wells said to the students of Duke: “Some few believe that theology is the queen of the sciences, and that the findings of science should be filtered through the truths of faith, because theological questions of why always precede scientific questions of how.” Some might have accepted this in good faith and gullibility. And some may not have.
In one of his poems, Kipling identified six short but powerful words that he kept as six ‘honest serving men’. He said ‘their names are What? and Why? and When?, and How? and Where? and Who?’ Scientists use them all, and also as parts of other expressions like ‘what if?’ and ‘how come?’ But the most powerful pair in my experience are ‘why is it so?’ and ‘is that so?’
A theologian is in no position to answer why, how or anything else, because all he or she has to work with is a deliberately limited selection of ancient texts whose authority and validity at every turn of the page is disputed, not by scientists so much as other theologians; so much so that there is nothing in the New Testament that has not been challenged by some of them. So ‘is that so?’ is just as much a theologian’s question as a scientist’s.
According to Wells, one question theologians can answer is: “Was it always in the mind and heart of God to be in relationship with creation, and for that relationship to be focused by entering creation as a co-participant at some stage in the story?” He then adds: “That’s not a question science can answer, but it’s hard to deny it’s an exhilarating question to set alongside the others…”
Well agreed. No scientist can just ring up God and say ‘I’d just like to check one matter and get an answer from you on it. Was it always in your mind and heart…(etc)?’ I for one would never do that, because I might catch God in a foul mood. He has been said to have them.
But then, no theologian can answer that either, except by quoting disputed and disputable texts.
Then Wells continues: “Just imagine the attentiveness and absorption of God in beholding the evolution of creation, and awaiting the right time to enter it in order to be a co-participant with that part of it that could show some conscience and awareness in return. That’s not a manipulative picture. That’s a picture of astounding, patient, devoted, indescribable love.”
It’s also a picture of astounding, patient, devoted, and indescribable confusion. I think it would have been both scientifically good and theologically essential to have a tally of those still awake at that stage of the sermon.
There was this Original Sin. Precisely what it was the ancient texts get a bit coy about, though Freud and others have made suggestions. But once done, the Sin contaminated all the descendants of the two Original Sinners, which means everyone on Earth. But how the transmission keeps taking place with every new generation that arises, ie the precise manner and mechanism of that hereditary transmission, nobody has ever been able to work out, not even whole conceivable schools of genetic theologians and theological geneticists. No ancient text has ever provided an answer either. It has been just assumed, on the basis that like breeds like. (But is that always so?)
However, theology does have a ‘why’. Once done, that Original Sin made it necessary for God to come to Earth as his own son, and be sacrificed to himself to pay the price for all the sins he never committed against himself in the first place, but all the rest of us did. Well if that’s reasonable and just, then I’m a Martian astronaut.
But then Wells is back for another go:
“Once you put these two questions together, where are we coming from, and where are we going, you’re into territory where science and theology can have a really interesting conversation. Now the question is, ‘What, if anything, is the logic at the heart of the universe?’ The Big Bang and evolution are huge contributions to science and philosophy. But here’s the danger. Once you turn them uncritically into theology, as the New Atheists tend to do, you get a single-word answer: survival. Survival of each creature, because death is the end, and survival of each species, because extinction is forever. The whole dynamic of history mutates into survival, and adaptation that enables survival is what’s known as progress. Conflict is the dynamic at the heart of every encounter, and survival is the reward for those who win the battle.
“ But theology has a very different answer. Christians believe the logic, the logos, or word, at the heart of the universe, is not about survival. It’s about death and resurrection. The ultimate future doesn’t belong to those who have fought and prevailed; it belongs to those who’ve laid down their lives for others. This timeless logic is exemplified not in the species that survives, but in the single human being who accepted brutal execution and yet was raised to new life. The real big bang that dominates the Christian imagination is not the detonation that inaugurated the universe, but the rolling-away of the stone that signalled the death of death.”
This is truly staggering in its flailing and crashing profundity. There was no death until the Original Sin. Whatever it was that Adam and Eve did: that bite of the metaphorical apple, it changed the entire face of nature.
But as Eric and others have already noted, the idea of a primally flawed humanity is a real can of worms. It is not such a big step from a flawed and polluted species, which we can’t do much about, to a flawed and polluted race, for which in the case of the Germans a diagnosis was made and a cure was tried. Ergo: any ideology or religion which bases itself on the notion that humanity is fundamentally flawed (as distinct from infinitely various) is itself fundamentally flawed. We are not talking about The Original Sin any more: rather the Original Theological Error.