New York Times Op-Ed: ‘The Reason I’m Not an Atheist Is That I Think the Philosophical Arguments Against It Are Unanswerable’, by Peter Wehner (Trinity Forum):
David Bentley Hart is one of the world’s most formidable and provocative theological minds. He is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, a philosopher, a cultural commentator and a fiction writer. Dr. Hart is the author of more than 30 books spanning theology and metaphysics, philosophy, biblical scholarship and translation, political theology and linguistics, as well as his fiction and children’s novels.
I spoke to Dr. Hart about why Jesus captured his imagination, whether suffering and evil in the world calls God’s goodness into question, and why he doesn’t believe that the Bible teaches the concept of eternal conscious torment. He explained why he believes beauty is a central category of Christian thought, why moral reasoning and moral intuitions must be an essential part of biblical interpretation, and why materialists can’t adequately explain how consciousness has emerged.
Dr. Hart also shared with me why he’s become increasingly indifferent to dogmatic and institutional authority, why he believes that historically the church has been as evil as it has been good, and why he has a “burning sense of obligation” to those whom Jesus loved — the poor, the marginalized, the strangers in our midst. What emerged in the interview is a sense that he feels compelled to defend the character of God against many of those who claim to speak for God.
Peter Wehner: You’ve described yourself as a “thoroughly secular man,” one having little or no natural aptitude for religious sentiment. The Christian religion as a dogmatic and institutional reality is secondary and marginal to your faith. If C.S. Lewis was, in his words, the most reluctant convert in all of England, it seems to me you qualify as one of the more reluctant converts in all America, or maybe to be more precise, one of the most surprising converts in America. You and Lewis differ in important respects, yet like Lewis you write beautifully and powerfully about the Christian faith and about Jesus. What is it that drew you to faith and what keeps you there? Why is Christianity the story you inhabit?
David Bentley Hart: The word “convert” probably doesn’t suit me very well in this context. I have converted from certain things to other things. I was a high church Episcopalian as a boy and became Eastern Orthodox as a young man. But it’s true that I’ve never had the aptitude for spontaneous piety of the churchly sort. From an early age, I had a profound sense of some mystery lying beyond nature. And when I’m in natural settings, that’s when my capacity for reverence tends to kick in. But institutional claims, dogmatic claims, the demands of piety, the romance of piety have never had a hold on me by themselves.
What made Christianity compelling to me from an early age had to do with two considerations. One is that I couldn’t account for the claims made about Easter by the early Christians in the New Testament. The more I studied, too, I became more and more convinced of the extraordinary oddity of these claims as compared to what happened with other messianic movements.
Now within the context of more modern history, we’re aware of movements that can take off from a prophet claiming a certain charisma and can be fairly successful in their own terms. But this was something different. This was within the context of messianic expectations in first century Judea that simply seemed not to have come to pass. Other figures before Jesus who had been the focus of messianic movements had died. And rather than his followers simply scattering to the four winds, they soon appeared claiming to have had an experience. And just as a historical anomaly I found this experience hard to explain away psychologically or sociologically.
But that was further along in my education. The thing that always gripped me was the personality, the person, of Jesus as presented in the Gospels. I had a good classical education from an early age and was aware there was some huge epochal shift in his teachings that I’ve never been able to see simply as a fortuitous historical event.
To me, something new happened there. Many of the things that we now take to be morally appealing in Jesus were actually rather scandalous in their time. These weren’t just new principles; some of them were considered wrong. A sort of boundless degree of forgiveness was not an ideal, not even in Stoicism, not even in the prophets. Jesus also had this concern for the most abject, the most indigent people in the world. There was a category of the deserving poor in the ancient world. But the ptōchoi, the most wretched, while always the object of minimal charity, were regarded as being too debased as a rule to make it worthwhile to provide them with more than some alms. What made the ministry of Jesus so strange in late antiquity was that he made them the actual center of his concern, and even declared that the Kingdom of Heaven was theirs. So that was it. It’s the strangeness, it’s the uncanniness of this figure in his time and place first and foremost that captured my imagination and continues to do so. …
Wehner: You’ve said you found Jesus to be an “infinitely compelling” figure, and that you “cannot fit him easily into the normal chronicles of human history.” You just explained why. You’ve pointed out that the issue of suffering and evil in the world isn’t an argument against God’s existence, but it does go directly to the issue of divine goodness. You’ve stated that “we exist in a world of monstrous evil and monstrous suffering. And the theist traditions tell us that behind all of this is a God of infinite justice, mercy, love and intellect.” The contrast between the suffering of children and the claim that God is all-powerful and all-good is enough to call into question the claim itself. So what’s the best way for Christians to think about theodicy, the defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in the view of the existence of evil? Is it found in Christ’s wordless kiss to the Grand Inquisitor in “The Brothers Karamazov,” which can be understood as a moment of healing grace rather than a logical response to an argument, as an act of mercy and empathy that transcends human understanding? Or is there a better way to think about this?
Hart: There’s a partial answer in that, but it’s one that requires interpretation. Curiously enough, I’m not a great admirer of Dostoyevsky as an artist. I don’t think he was an equal of Tolstoy. But what he did have was a moral genius that could break through even his horrible prejudices, like his antisemitism. No one has ever stated more powerfully the moral case against accepting the terms of our existence as adequate to the claims of God’s goodness. By “terms of our existence,” I meant the evils Ivan makes so much of in the chapter “Rebellion,” which are principally the sufferings of children. For him, on these terms, existence in this world and even the promise of some final Kingdom in which all will be reconciled cannot be justified. And yes, I think the figure of Christ, the silent, the enigmatic figure of the Christ who reverses the kiss of Judas there and bestows a kiss of forgiveness, of reconciliation, is part of it.
But my first piece of advice on theodicy has always been to avoid theodicy, because any attempt to justify the ways of God to man in terms of why this happened already presumes a kind moral teleology to evil. Here’s what I mean by that: theodicy tries to show how evil exists as part of a great plan to achieve some greater good, which of course justifies evil. It makes it seem as if, yes, it’s sad that little girl died of cancer, but in the end it was necessary. That strikes me as obscene. Whatever one thinks of that, the New Testament never speaks in such terms. Rather, it treats evil in terms of a kind of provisional dualism. It sees evil simply as a contingent distortion and violation of creation, sustained by the arkhōn of this kosmos, against which God is at war in Christ, and which is overthrown by Christ.
The New Testament speaks of creation as something broken and distorted and destroyed by spiritual freedoms gone astray, and the whole structure of reality that we know is in some sense alien to true creation.
In the Gospel of John, the arkhōn of this kosmos, the ruler of this world, or in Paul, the god of this age, is not God, but a malevolent figure, whether symbolic or real. I don’t know if I find it adequate, but I find it sufficiently persuasive at least to say that a ruined creation as the result of a necessary spiritual freedom that is the only way in which spiritual beings can come into real existence is the closest we can come to an explanation.
But that means we don’t justify this evil or that evil as part of some grand plan, but rather see the world as a place in need of rescue from a catastrophe that has occurred in some frame of reality we don’t know and don’t understand.
My fear of theodicy is that it becomes not just a justification of God but a justification of evil. It’s not just that I’m trying to justify God in the face of a child dying from diphtheria or a death camp; I’m actually justifying the death of that child and that death camp. At that point, the whole moral grammar of the New Testament seems to collapse in on itself. …
Wehner: The so-called new atheists, including Daniel Dennett when he was alive and Richard Dawkins today, are materialists, meaning they believe that all aspects of life including consciousness can be explained by physical scientific processes. There’s no room in their worldview for an immaterial soul. Your friend Iain McGilchrist, a philosopher and psychiatrist in neuroscience, has said that he has a deepening sense that “there is something very important, very deep in the world that is not summed up in a material account.” The way he put it is that “not everything that matters is matter and is measurable.” As I understand your view expressed in, among other places, your Platonic dialogue, “All Things Are Full of Gods,” materialists can’t adequately explain how consciousness has emerged given their materialistic presuppositions, and you believe, too, that the foundation of all reality is spiritual and mental, not material. Can you expand on what you most want to convey to readers in that book?
Hart: The reason I’m not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable, or at least the philosophical arguments for something beyond materialism are unanswerable. …
Wehner: That translation was a phenomenal achievement. A last question, David. What do you hope will be among your greatest contributions to theology, to people’s understanding of God and to people’s understanding of Jesus?
Hart: As I said before, the counsel of conscience is indispensable to understanding any of this. The notion that we’re so depraved and sinful that we can’t see the radiant goodness in the slaughter of a whole town is so perverted that if that were actually part of the essence of Christianity, it would be much better that Christianity ceased to exist right now.
In my mind, there’s actually a fairly simple index of this. Your conscience united to what are pretty clear and concrete moral demands are already a metaphysics; they are already a doctrine. That is, they are declarations of the eternal character of God. If you cannot square the two, if you have to equivocate when you use words like goodness and justice and mercy, then what you believe is, by definition, meaningless and almost certainly evil. I suppose that’s it, actually.
In a general sense, if I have any effect on the larger discourse, it would be just that: The innocence of God, the goodness of God, the goodness of what you understand when you use this mysterious word God, as a verdict on the whole of reality, has to be morally continuous. It has to be coherent. It cannot tolerate this contagion that renders all belief incoherent and evil.
Editor’s Note: If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.
