No One Sees God: The Dialogue Continues

By Dean Brooks After reading No One Sees God, a reader sent me the following e-mail that poses a very tough question. I will post my response to his question in the coming days.

I have read a vast number of apologetics and histories of religion over the years -- the specifically Catholic writers include Garry Wills and William F. Buckley, but I have ranged over Paul Johnson, Karen Armstrong, Billy Graham, Lee Strobel, Bishop Spong, C. S. Lewis, the whole gamut. In many ways, No One Sees God is well above the average, but it has a serious flaw in my view.

In my experience, Christians of all denominations uniformly misconstrue the most important atheist objection, casting it as "Why does God let bad things happen to good people?" Mr. Novak does this as well. It is a weak form of the objection and misses the point. In fact, the really divisive question is about authority and mystery -- the passages in the Bible where God actually orders good people to do bad things.

The slaughter of the Midianites would be one example. God doesn't simply watch while wicked men kill women and children. Nor does he kill human beings directly, as he did in the Flood. He orders Moses and the army to carry out the execution. He involves them in the horror. The army of Israel refuses the first time, and Moses has to order them again to kill all the women and male children, and to keep all the virgin girls 'for yourselves'.

I have searched concordances, old and new editions of the Catholic Encyclopedia, literally hundreds of texts over a span of 20 years. Most pass over this episode in silence. A few refer to it as "difficult" but then say nothing more. The closest I have come to a Christian defense of this story was a Protestant writer who insisted that the Midianite women were all wicked whores who deserved what they got, and killing the boys was a kindness as they would have died without their mothers. How it makes sense to kill whores (if they actually were such) but then make their daughters into concubines was not explained.

My reading of this passage is, I think, consistent with core Christian teaching -- but it is very disagreeable to most Christians. The Midianites were the people who sheltered Moses when he fled Egypt. They offered the Israelites shelter, food, and friendship, but they were outsiders, not worshippers of Jahweh. To respond to that offer of friendship by slaughtering them and their children is symbolic of a transcendent scale of values, far above compassion, reason, or human life. I take this episode as expressing the idea that God's authority is absolutely without limit, that there are no values apart from God's will, that man has no rights or dignity on his own account. If he wishes us to slaughter one another, we are in no position to question or disagree. The destruction of Midian does not make sense in worldly terms, but it is not intended to make sense. After killing children on God's orders, the Israelites have abandoned their humanity. They are united with God in a transcendent mystery, by a collective act that cannot be understood, or endured, or justified. They are beyond good or evil, into a realm of pure nihilism in human terms, one that only underscores the vast distance between God and man. It is meant to convey the idea that our humanity by itself is meaningless and worthless.

I have from time to time written to Christian writers and public figures to express my frustration with this episode and its evasive treatment in the literature. My record to date has been near-uniform failure.

The only exceptions have been a very well-respected seminary student who abandoned his studies when he read Ayn Rand, a newspaper columnist, and a street preacher. The seminary student by and large confirmed my interpretation. The columnist explained in very confused fashion that it was just symbolic, and I shouldn't take the Old Testament too seriously anyway. The preacher was very much taken aback by my question, saying in 40 years he had never had anyone raise it as a concern -- but then he said, "If God chose to throw us all into Hell, he would be right." Implying, I guess, that my interpretation is correct.

I don't mean to be impolite. I have experimented with different methods of asking this question over the years, prefacing it with longer or shorter explanations, and all have failed. It surely ought to matter. I cannot quite imagine how mass slaughter of children (followed by human sacrifice) can have been overlooked by so many for so long. But here we are.

I was particularly impressed by Mr. Novak's willingness to deal with the bleaker aspects of religious belief. I would class his arguments as among the most honest I have read. But it still does not go far enough, does not answer the basic question. It is not simply that we are in a dark night, where we cannot see God. If the Old Testament is in any way a reliable guide -- whether it is symbolic or literal is moot -- then this episode and others like it imply we must take the darkness into our souls. We must purge ourselves of all values, empty ourselves of humanity, become nothing but vessels of obedience to a God we do not understand even slightly. What lies on the other side of that act, we will only know after death.

Mr. Novak has a good reputation as writers go, he says some good things about the value of capitalism, and I wish him only the best. I am not trying to start a fight, to rant to Christians about how stupid and bad they are. Obviously, after 20 years of wrestling with this, I am also not a candidate for conversion. The theological argument involved fills me with nothing but horror, and I am not asking to be counselled, to be helped to embrace the faith. But we live together in this world, and unraveling this mystery is a project I find I cannot entirely let go of. I keep thinking that there might be one Christian somewhere who could answer this in an honest and straightforward manner, and break through the suffocating wall of denial and silence that I perceive. If Mr. Novak did, he would be doing the world a real service.

Really, I was touched by Mr. Novak's call for a dialogue. I am a sentimental man, and appeals to brotherhood never fail to attract my attention. So I thought I would try again.

Best wishes, Dean Brooks

Mushy Christianity

One of the greatest of recent seductions by that wily devil Screwtape – perfectly fitted to the times – is to puff a tiny sugar crystal of Christianity into sweetish airy cotton candy. “IN-clusiveness!” he will insist. “Christianity is about nothing if not IN-clusiveness.” That is how Screwtape sweet-talks you into affirming that some abomination (divorce, abortion, euthanasia, adultery, gay marriage) is, actually, included within the broad reach of Christian love. It would be positively un-Christian to think ill of that “abomination.” You should be ashamed you ever thought it was wrong. Are you a bigot or something?

“Strange!” I would have thought, “Christianity is about EX-clusion.” On the last day the Judge shall divide the world into sheep and goats, you over on the left, you over on the right. A few of you will be chosen to enter with me into Paradise. The rest will descend, as you have chosen, into everlasting punishment. I have come not to bring peace, but the sword. He who is not with me is against me. God sent His light into the darkness, and the darkness received it not. The gate is narrow, and the way is strait. Only a tiny remnant will be saved. There was much weeping, and tears, and gnashing of teeth.

You can look it up.

Take half an hour, skim through the gospels of Matthew and Mark. (Even more “un-Christian” are some of the Epistles of St. Paul.)

Screwtape has it all wrong. The moment you encounter someone stressing how IN-clusive Christianity is, walk away from him quickly, for the truth is not in him.

Conspicuously was this true of the infamous Newsweek article putting homosexual liaisons in paradise, and picturing marriage (in the Christian view) as a kind of hell. This article appeared at Christmastime – Christmastime! And it was later defended by the usually clear-eyed editor of Newsweek, John Meacham. That is the shrewdest sign of how skillful Screwtape is. He picks none but the best.

***

But another case: Much that passes today for “environmentalism” is exceedingly vulnerable to sudden and unexpected factual disproof. Old-fashioned preachments of hellfire and brimstone (in certain types of Christian churches in generations past) seem to have become a template for today’s dire depictions of the way the world will end all too soon.

If twenty years from now, however, world climate seems to have become dramatically colder year after year (temperatures have been flat or slightly cooler since 1997), and if more discoveries are made about the effect of activities within the Sun, which affect Ice Ages and Warming Ages on Earth, current panic may seem to have been exceedingly naive. Our children and grandchildren may look back at our gullibility with embarrassment. Or maybe not. The point is, to become careful and empirical and fact-oriented, not cause-oriented.

For myself (no scientist), I calculate that global cooling is more likely than global warming.

***

Mushy Christianity also results in obscurantist thinking about abortion. Some people think it is more “tolerant,” “broadminded”— more inclusive - to accept abortion as a new social reality. In fact, until 1973, nearly all jurisdictions in the United States regarded abortion as a disgusting violation of natural right. Alas, what our new abortion regime has done is narrow the circle of life and liberty.

This is liberal? This is Christian?

President Lincoln not only opposed slavery but also opposed the rights of states to have a “choice” in whether to permit slavery or not. His purpose in opposing both slavery and “choice” was to expand the circle of life and liberty. (No one can choose to put himself in slavery; no one can choose to abort himself; therefore, no one has the right to enslave or to abort anyone else.) The dismantling of the institution of slavery was, indeed, a liberal purpose, and a Christian one.

Again, on January 23, our new president reinstated the culture of death in American overseas programs and foreign aid. American tax money will again be used to pay for abortions overseas. “What is the solution,” I have often heard people overseas ask, “that the richest country on earth brings to the poorest peoples on this planet? Surely a wealthy and caring United States has something better to offer than to pay women of the neediest nations to kill their own children.” And to do so during the very months when the children are most defenseless, in their mother’s womb. Many here and abroad find this strategy disgusting.

Moreover, this crude procedure deprives poor peoples (colored peoples mostly) of the full talents and beauties these not-yet-born human individuals are poised to contribute to the world. Children are the greatest natural resource any nation inherits. Human capital is the greatest and most irreplaceable of all forms of capital. It is the chief cause of the wealth of nations.

Each of the discarded little boys and (mostly) girls possesses an utterly individual DNA. No other is quite like any one of them. Abortion deprives Earth of their creative gifts.

Christianity came into the world to relieve us from, not add to, these and many other forms of human mush.

Michael Novak’s website is www.michaelnovak.net and his wife’s is laub-novakartist.com/

Published in The Catholic Thing February 10, 2009

Catholic Liberalism: The Social Ethics of Michael Novak

"The ideas of Novak inspired democratic transformations in Poland in the latter part of the 20th Century and even now his influence on the debates on liberalism in Poland is remarkable." -- Marcin Lisak Marcin Lisak of Poland has published a new book called Catholic Liberalism: The Social Ethics of Michael Novak (Krakow-Dublin 2008). According to his abstract:

The book contains an analysis of the social thought of Michael Novak. This well known American Philosopher is regarded as a prophet of democratic captialism, an exponent of "communitarian liberalism" as well as a reformer of Catholic Social Thought. Novak applies the core principles of his writings to the ethos of a free-market economy and a pluralistic state, both based on Christian values. The ideas of Novak inspired democratic transformations in Poland in the latter part of the 20th Century and even now his influence on the debates on liberalism in Poland is remarkable.

President Obama's First Week

The Obama Presidency is only one week old, but it has already limned its main moral outlines. Consider what President Obama listed as his first priorities during his first four days in office:

--On January 20, President Obama called for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. He also declared his intention to give multiple rights and privileges to homosexual couples.

--On January 22nd, he issued an executive order announcing his intention to close the detention facility for battlefield terrorists at Guantanamo, Cuba, within one year, but admits he has not figured out how to do that. (President Bush expressed a similar wish, but could find no other nations willing to help take responsibility for the detainees.) A shiny intention, then, but no hard thinking about how to get it done.

--On the 23rd, President Obama issued an executive order that authorizes American tax dollars for abortions in foreign lands.

***

From these three executive announcements we learn that President Obama recognizes no difference between the Jewish-Christian covenant between a woman and a man (a covenant that they will have and nurture children, if they are so blessed), and a civil contract between two persons of any gender, in order to set up a household of affection and sexual favors. He refuses to defend the first, and he orders the second to be treated identically to the first.

***

This is a relapse into a moral understanding B.C.E. – Before the (Jewish-) Christian Era. It is a return to paganism. It is a failure to grasp the distinctive and crucial defense which Judaism and Christianity put around the family, best of all nurturers of strong individuals. The point of monogamous family networks is to treat male and female with complementary and mutually cooperative dignity, and to tie the power of sexuality (male, especially) to self-sacrificing communities of love. From these two poles -- independent individuals and strong family networks -- liberal civilization has been generated.

Almost all religious civilizations honor the family, but none better emphasizes both individual responsibility and universal solidarity. None has proven so suited to generating liberal institutions.

***

We learn, second, that this President takes as his guiding light in matters of national security, not hard realism in protecting “the People” who daily ratify the Constitution, but personal concern for what kind of figure he is cutting in the international eye. This young President wants praise from the international left, at the cost of carelessness about the practical safety of his homeland. Good headlines first, practical thinking later.

***

Thirdly, we learn that the President is willing to do what a substantial bloc of U.S. tax payers morally abhor -- and will resist in conscience. Moreover, a large number of foreign observers will again mock the United States: “Here (again) come the American Baby-Killers!” It is a mistake to think that people in most other nations love, honor, and respect the secularist preoccupation with abortion.

What, they ask, is the solution that the richest country on earth brings to the poorest peoples on this planet? Surely a wealthy and caring U.S. has something better to offer than to pay women of the neediest nations to kill their own children. And to do so during the very months when the children are most defenseless, in their mother’s womb. Many here and abroad find this strategy disgusting.

This crude procedure deprives poor peoples, colored peoples (mostly), of the full talents and beauties these not-yet-born human individuals are poised to contribute to the world. Children are the greatest natural resource any nation inherits. Human capital is the greatest and most irreplaceable of all forms of capital. It is the chief cause of the wealth of nations.

Each of the discarded little boys and (mostly) girls possesses an utterly individual DNA. No other is quite like them. Abortion deprives Earth of their creative gifts.

***

It is hard to think of an American President who in character and purpose is less like Abraham Lincoln than Barack Obama. Even in his first week, President Obama, unlike Lincoln, made it his main purpose to narrow the circle of those human beings whose rights need to be protected in law. Lincoln expanded the circle of life and liberty, whereas the impulse of President Obama is to constrict it. Lincoln’s was a liberal purpose, Obama’s is illiberal.

To protect the Union and its Constitution – the apple of gold in a silver frame – Lincoln found it necessary and right to suspend habeas corpus and other civil rights, in certain places and in certain circumstances. President Obama acts as though the Union and its Constitution forbid their own out-of-the-ordinary defense, even in extreme moments of danger and destruction.

The first week did not have to begin this way. These first steps were unworthy of a great nation, and unworthy of a serious leader. These executive decisions humiliated those who voted for President Obama because they had been assured, and who assured others, that the new President would take seriously the culture of life. It is now clear that the new President was willing to allow those who risked their moral reputations to support him to feel in retrospect like liars. E.J. Dionne expressly warned the President-elect against this.

You can fool all the people once. But there are a lot of them you will never fool again. In his first week in office, Bill Clinton deeply wounded the moral force of his own presidency by turning abruptly against those who regard abortion as the greatest evil of our time, as slavery was in Lincoln’s time. It is sad to see a Democratic President make that same mistake again.

The Coming Fall

Lewes, Del. — My wife and I escaped from Washington out to the shore (at the Cape just where the Atlantic Ocean meets Delaware Bay), partly because we couldn’t face the traffic and large-scale “lock down” in which Washington, invaded by hundreds of thousands upon thousands, now finds itself. We were not permitted to drive downtown. Subways are jammed. My office is closed. Taxicabs are all occupied. But worst of all as we left town was the Leader-focused enthusiasm of the crowds, and the pre-inaugural grandiosity of the new president-elect.

At the pre-inauguration concert on the National Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial, dark red banners on the temporary stands of the amphitheater built for the occasion, with adulatory crowds packed into them, brought back ugly newsreel images from my childhood. The feeling expressed by many who were there and others who watched on television reveals a strain of messianism that ill becomes a democratic republic. It fits better with political systems based upon the cult of personality.

Every day, President-elect Obama was finding a new way to associate himself with Abraham Lincoln, the great hero of the American imagination, slain by an assassin’s bullet in Ford’s Theater in April of 1865.

Yet Lincoln was the first Republican president, not a Democrat. and he led the nation into what many thought was an unnecessary and unpopular war, the bloodiest war in the entire history of the United States, the Civil War of 1861–65, the War “to save the Union,” which also emancipated the slaves. Lincoln was the bravest, most long-suffering, and often in those days most popularly despised among all our presidents. Some 24 hours before President Obama gave his inaugural address someone on his staff said in the hearing of journalists that the new president fully expects some of his word to be one day chiseled in marble.

It may happen. But that pretension captured the pre-inaugual atmosphere. It was even believable, for the new president has proven to be a very eloquent speaker. Thus, no new president has ever come to Washington with higher standing in the popular polls, and higher expectations of a swift upturn in the nation’s well-being.

In January of the year 1993, I was called upon to give a talk at the Renaissance Weekend at which President-elect Bill Clinton and his “co-president” Hillary were present (two for the price of one, the campaigner had earlier quipped). I said on that occasion what I now repeat on this: There was too much enthusiasm in the air, and too much false association with the Camelot of John F. Kennedy so early in 1960. Every president in my adult lifetime, I said, has come in with high hopes and been dashed into humiliation before his term of office had concluded. Kennedy. Johnson. Nixon. Ford. Carter. Reagan (dimmed by Iran-Contra). Bush 41. Clinton. Bush 43. The job of president is to cope with his own coming tragedy. No man can fulfill all the hopes that go with the office. His own strengths often undo him.

President Obama’s great strengths are his capacity for myth-building and seduction, by sowing unreasonable hopes. His fall may be especially sad . . . even though he is likely to experience, before that, a run of good luck in the economy.

The run of good luck will show up when the economy slowly begins to turn upwards in June or July of this year, as the number of mortgage foreclosures of owner-occupied homes steadily falls. Mortgage companies are already resuming their traditional controls over credit, as in the more solid past, and they are now over-busy trying to handle a great wave of home-refinancing. Citizens are overwhelming national mortgage companies such as Wells Fargo (Des Moines) and USAA (the financial services company for the military, based in San Antonio) with applications for re-financing, as home owners rush to take advantage of the unusually low interest rates.

A number of banks and mortgage companies have announced that they are willing to write down hefty losses on loans they earlier and foolishly made. They judge it better to save what they can from their own bad decisions of the recent past. If this happens, many families will keep their homes, while paying interest on lower principal. And the banks will keep receiving steady income. A certain realism seems to be slowly overtaking the recent panic.

In addition, growth in productivity is still visible. Further, even though in the last six months the economy lost more than a million jobs, the number of Americans employed as 2009 begins is still higher than on January 21, 2000—by about 3 million on the Labor Department’s payroll survey, and by about 11 million on their household survey.

Moreover, it has been a mistake for Obama supporters to vent their anger at outgoing President Bush, by exaggerating the plight of our admittedly wounded economy. It is self-defeating to talk down the economy, while talking up the miracles about to be worked by President Obama. The inaugural address did not quite go that far, but it may have turned the tone of discussion in that direction.

To point now to existing strengths in the economy would have two advantages: it would help the new president change the national atmosphere, and it would be honest. It is time to shift from the negativism of campaigning to the realism of making things better, by building on existing strengths.

Another bit of good luck for the president will be a dramatic change in the attitude of the press. Beginning on Day One, the press will start focusing on optimism and magnifying every faintest sign of progress, in order to help President Obama. They will blow out the sails of his myth-making and miracle-working. All to the good! It beats unrelenting negativism.

American presidents are, inevitably, something like Christ figures. They must all suffer and, eventually, fall. Human nature, as the Poet says, cannot bear too much success.

We may hope that the new president, who has an acute mind, recognizes what fate has in store for him—and puts if off as long as he can by adjusting the myths under which he campaigned, to the realities of the way the world works. There are signs he has already begun that (in protecting the transition in Iraq, in defending the homeland against terrorist attacks, in seeking the economic benefits of low tax rates, just to mention a few just now in evidence). The new sober tone of the inaugural may be a further indication.

But there are other signs he and his team have a lot to learn, in order to come down to the world as it is. He has already seriously neglected some of the traditional courtesies and deferences that a president owes to individual Senators, his team has failed properly and solidly to vet several of his cabinet choices. His mantra of “change” is indiscriminate and myth-building. There are many solid rocks in American life that, his inaugural address affirmed, he would not want to change.

Also, we Americans inherit a happy tradition, which it is good to see the new administration celebrating. Abraham Lincoln once taught us that being born in a log cabin in the hard-scrabble hills of Kentucky was no bar to being elected president of the United States. Power has been peacefully handed off from one administration to another 44 times in American history (including the first to take up this office, George Washington, who was handed off power peacefully by a new Constitution). It has usually been done with a personal courtesy and a popular enthusiasm about which the Constitution is silent—unless one counts the Constitution written down in American hearts and mores. Leges sine moribus vanae. (Laws cut off from mores are empty.)

These lessons of principle and of tradition—and many other practical ones learned by presidents down the years (about appeasement, about the effects of government spending on inflation, etc.) — Obama is now in a position to learn, if he chooses to do so. Traditions live only by changing. But where to prune and where to let live is the highest of human arts, Aristotle taught.

So, as the earliest Americans greeted Washington, for Obama, too: “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!” Plus also a little sadness for what must come.

Published in National Review Online January 23, 2009

March for Life

This afternoon, EWTN broadcasted the March for Life. I watched for nearly three hours as the march just kept streaming up the street, often as many as fifteen abreast. As we think of the first African-American president in history, our minds drift to one class of Americans who will never be allowed to become president—the 45 million lives aborted in the womb since 1972.

Has it touched the heart of our first African-American president that the largest single number of the aborted are black children in the womb—13 million of them? These are children who will never be allowed to achieve the dreams they would have developed. These are children who will never be able to vote. These are children whose unique contributions to American politics, the arts, our culture, and the many different professions and occupations of our working lives will never come to full bloom.

I think many are now praying that the eyes of Barack and Michelle Obama will be opened and that they will not seek to narrow the circle the number of Americans whose rights are protected in law, but rather to widen the circle so that the rights of these great potential talents and loving persons will be protected during the months of their greatest vulnerability.

Published in National Review Online's Blog The Corner January 22, 2009

Studying Obama's Rhetoric

The change from President Obama's campaign rhetoric to his presidential rhetoric is striking. The change was, in fact, so abrupt that the vast crowd seemed largely puzzled by it, and applause was neither frequent nor greatly animated—even though the pilgrims on the cold two-mile Mall seemed ready to burst out with emotion. The presidential Inaugural was quite conservative in its vision of "revolution," in the distinctly American way. For us, from the beginning, revolution has always meant re-volution, from the Latin for "turn back to one's beginnings" as a wheel turns around from top to bottom and back to the top again. The reason Americans do this is that they love this nation's first principles, the origin of its idealism and its energy. As the motto on the Seal of the United States says, "Annuit Coeptis," that is, "Providence smiled on our beginnings or, better, on the principles in which we were conceived."

President Obama's rhetoric about these first principles had the ring of a political conservative—its emphasis upon founding principles, tradition, patriotism, courage, honesty, and responsibility. His rhetoric was not nearly so much Big-Government oriented as his campaign speech had been. He praised the market as having no peer in its ability to favor the creation of new wealth and the expansion of liberty. He seemed to set both government and the market as co-equals. The principle he chose for giving priority, case by case, to one dynamism or the other was "what works."

His turn of thought and phrase here was, it seemed to me, a good deal more Burkean than most of today's liberals know how to feel and speak. He did not show quite the fear of the self-aggrandizement of government that conservatives have traditionally invoked, in order to encourage vigilance. But he was far more cautious than utopian liberals about how well the government can actually function.

The address itself was far more pedestrian than I had expected, far less given to stirring utopian flights than his campaign speeches generally were. It was often given to easy clichés—about shadows, storms, and onward marches despite the odds. There were a few quite eloquent passages as the Address approached its conclusion, passages summoning witnesses from the past to stir contemporary hearts with love for first principles and for personal responsibility.

I suspect that the address did more to reassure conservatives than to excite liberals; and that those farther left might have felt the stirrings of anxiety about it.

Rhetorically, at least, between election day on the first Tuesday of November and his swearing in on the third Tuesday of January, Obama has made quite a turn in the direction of realism, and away from his earlier soaring utopianism.

On these points, there may be a churning interior struggle in his own heart.

Published in National Review Online's Blog The Corner January 20, 2009

The Use of Religious Studies

Nothing is less certain over time than the certainties of successive generations. Each generation tends to be wrong in a different way. Between the end of World War II and 1971, when I published Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove: An Introduction to Religious Studies, many great secular universities neglected the living realities of religion, believing that religion would soon vanish from history, i.e., the “secularization hypothesis.” Its proponents didn’t anticipate the decline in the self-confidence of secularism after 1975, partly from the rise of post-modernism and other such attacks (feminism and some black studies advocates, too) upon human reason, and partly from the very real upsurge of religious energy in many places around the world. Europe, indeed, became more secular, but in the United States a broad religious awakening was gathering force. The civil rights movement led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the anti-Vietnam War movement often found themselves using churches for their meetings and religious leaders as sponsors of training sessions and seminars. The growing sense of the inner emptiness of modern secular culture drove a significant number of secular Jews into a reinvestigation of Jewish orthodoxy and tradition, and many Catholics and Protestants drifted back towards religious engagement. By 1971, departments of religious studies were beginning to open at secular universities, and journalists seemed to write more and more stories about the internal and external dramas of religious awakening. The secularization hypothesis seemed to have gotten things exactly backwards. Secularism, its inner vitality played out, was beginning to decline, while religion was turning out to be far more dramatic. The belated turn towards religious studies revealed realities of intense interest to investigators.

Religion even seemed to have become in a way the center of the action. On the negative side, the orange flames and brown-black smoke at the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001, shocked even some of the most distinguished secularization proponents in Europe. For the first time, some recognized that their small secular world was only an island in a vast turbulent sea of highly differentiated religious energy. The rapid growth of Christianity in coercively secular China, and vastly more so in Africa, slowly came to be acknowledged.

Even in Europe, intellectuals who consider themselves secular (like Jurgen Habermas in Germany, and Marcello Pera in Italy, both of whom have been in serious dialogue with Benedict XVI) have stated publicly that many Enlightenment ideals such as “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” owe their origins to Jewish and Christian aspirations, as do “compassion” and “solidarity.” The dream of a merely “secular” world was an illusion.

Initially, this new branch of investigation, “Religious Studies,” was created to do two things. First, these new departments would teach about all religions, not one only, and even about unbelief itself, as one choice among many for seeing and living life. Second, their subject matter and methods would differ from those of the schools of divinity and traditional courses in theology that had appeared here and there since the earliest days of the founding of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other early universities. The new point of view would shift from one strong, enduring tradition, to learning to “cross over” (intellectually) from one tradition to another, for purposes of enriching students’ comprehension of each.

For example, Jewish students would gain some understanding of the way Christians of different varieties approach life’s big questions; Christian students would gain a better comprehension of how Jews read the Bible, and divide into secular and religious; departments would also deal with how unbelievers cope with questions of evil, suffering, loss, and personal moral fault. Today, re-reading my short book some thirty-eight years later, I find that the tools it presents for identifying one’s standpoint and horizon, and the horizons of others, are still highly useful: “standpoint” and “horizon” themselves need defining, as do terms such as experiencing, imagining, understanding, judging, and deciding to act. The same goes for grasping the twists and turns of narrative or “story” in each of our lives. At age thirty, though we are much the same person we were at twenty, in some ways we will have changed quite a lot – in our standpoint, in our horizon, and perhaps in our habits. I have certainly experienced such changes, along with such continuities, over the past four decades.

“Religious Studies” is not the deepest way to study religious vitality. “Theology” is deepest, and the theology of a specific tradition at that because, at the end of the day, there is no generic religion, but a set of particular faiths that engage in reasoned reflection on their own religious traditions, together with respectful reasoning about other major traditions. It is an always incomplete exercise and some have criticized it because it may suggest that all traditions are equally true – or false. But properly understood, it is an inescapable part of the modern world that we be aware both of ourselves and of our relations with others, and here as in much else, we should not let the best become the enemy of the good.

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Published in The Catholic Thing January 15, 2009

A Second Brother Dies

For the second time, my brother Richard has died, first my blood brother Father Richard Novak in January many years ago in Bangladesh, now today Father Richard John Neuhaus in New York City. Surrounded by many of his friends and surviving family, Fr. Neuhaus died peacefully in his sleep, having been unconscious since the day before. He had been hospitalized Dec. 26 for the second (and last) time in recent weeks. Not long after having been diagnosed with a serious cancer about a month ago, he fell ill under a severe infection that (if I understand correctly) refused to be stopped, and slowly spread until it reached his heart.

It has been a very long time (if ever) since any American Catholic priest had as much influence in the Vatican, in the highest reaches of American life, on the intellectual culture of Christianity here and abroad, on Christian-Jewish conversations of the deepest and warmest sort, on the relations of Evangelicals and Catholics in this land, and on the intellectual life of his beloved New York City, which he first began to serve almost fifty years ago as a Lutheran pastor in a large black church in Brooklyn.

He died short of his 73nd birthday, which falls on May 14.

Neuhaus founded the journal First Things in 1990.Fr. Neuhaus was the best leader of a seminar that many participants in his many seminars had ever experienced. He seemed always to be in the lead of important moral, religious, and political movements, often even years before others came to see any such need. Friends teased him that Martin Luther nailed a mere 95 theses in one manifesto on a church door in Wittenburg, whereas Fr. Richard seemed to draft whole manifestos every three or four years. For instance, on the non-negotiables of Christian Faith, on religious liberty, on what was morally wrong with the conduct of the war in Vietnam, on ecumenical study and conversation, on Evangelical-Catholic cooperation, on abortion and other pro-life issues, and so forth.

He was many times a guest at the table of Pope John Paul II, and at least once, before he became Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was speaker, seminar-leader and guest of Father Richard at his Institute for Public Life in Manhattan.

The cherished center of the public life of Fr. Neuhaus has been the monthly journal First Things, which many around the world take to be the most serious and best religious publication in the entire English-speaking world – and perhaps without rival in any language. His own monthly round-up in that journal The Public Square always took up ample space, showed the most amazing wide range of reading and witty prose, and was by far the best-read section of each monthly issue. Its readers felt that no one they knew was in touch with as many vital cultural currents and on such a deep level, and wrote about them with equal wryness, humor, and adroit puncturing of pretence.

Richard Neuhaus always followed where the best evidence available to him called. He moved to the radical side of the critique of the too-complacent liberalism of the late 1960s, and then slowly toward the criticism of radicalism when it lost its Christian moorings, and drifted before the winds of unguided passion and political fantasy.

He bore with grace the charge of having become “neo-conservative,” when the term was intended as an insult, and even turned that charge into a positive advantage, carving out a new blend of Christian orthodoxy and political realism. Increasingly, he regained his love for the nobility of the American experiment, a term he understood with all its attendant ironies.

He was a great friend to Martin Luther King, William F. Buckley, Jr., Peter Berger and many other great public spirits of our time. In fact, few people in the world have shown his talent for friendship. Even fewer have a heartier laugh or a more frequent witticism. Almost none have his range of serious reading and profound observation. His judgment on ideas and events was unusually compelling and often much more on target than that of others. He welcomed objection, criticism, and open disagreement, taking all of them in generously and well, even when he sometimes felt their sting.

He was an extraordinary pastor of souls. He influenced, even directed, some thousands of personal voyages through dark and dubious times, and spoke with immediacy to many troubled hearts. He encouraged many budding talents, and gave many young writers (and preachers and others) a first start.

Brought up as the son of a Lutheran pastor, the younger Neuhaus was nourished from his seminary days on by the community of those Lutherans who held that the aim of Luther was to bring the Catholic Church back to fidelity to its origins, and who were deeply committed to a much-desired reunion of the two separated communities. Painfully, the younger Pastor Neuhaus came to judge that nowadays the Catholic Church was ever more serious about such self-reform, just as some key leaders among Lutherans were drifting toward not concretely wanting such unity, in any case not soon. He felt obliged to follow his vocation to join the Catholic Church, not as a conversion, but as a public declaration of what he had always believed. He did so despite a certain cultural resistance from others, even in his new communion.

Father Neuhaus was the most consequential Christian intellectual in America since Reinhold Niebuhr. He was the most consequential Catholic since John Courtney Murray, S.J., and Fulton J. Sheen. He was a worthy successor in a long chain of great witnesses.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board at First Things, is a scholar in residence at the American Enterprise Institute.

Published in National Catholic Reporter January 8, 2009

Christmas Atheists

Over the last two weeks, leading American atheists have registered complaints about all the attention given to Christmas in the United States. These atheists have issued three challenges. First, they insist that being atheist does not mean being immoral. Second, they want other people to see that atheists are law-abiding, compassionate, and generous to others—that one does not have to be Christian or to feel “the Christmas spirit” to care for the poor and the needy. Third, they insist that monotheists have a harder time being tolerant of others than atheists do. Atheists, they think, are more humble, tolerant, and sweet-tempered; since monotheists think that they “have” the truth, and know God’s will, they are more stiff-minded. In my own experience, though, many different belief systems are found among people who call themselves atheists. Here is just a small collection:

One. Those rationalists who believe in science, rationality, and truth, and who abhor relativism and nihilism, and who have very firm moral principles grounded in reason itself — but who see no evidence for the existence of God, neither for the theism of the ancient Greeks and Romans nor the personal God of Judaism and Christianity. They might wish that they could believe in God, but their intellectual conscience will not allow them to.

Two. Those relativists and nihilists who do believe, as Nietzsche warned, that the “death of God” has also meant the death of trust in reason and science and objective rules of morality. Such atheists, therefore, may for arbitrary reasons choose to live for their own pleasure, or for the joy of exercising brute power and will. This is the kind of moral nihilism that communist and fascist regimes depended upon, to justify the brutal use of power. It appears, also, to be the kind of atheism that Ayn Rand commended.

Three. Those who do not believe in the personal God who heeds prayers, and is concerned about the moral lives of individual human beings — the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. Instead, some who call themselves atheists actually do recognize a principle of intelligent order and even awe-inspiring beauty in the natural world. They also believe in a kind of primordial energy or dynamic power, which pushes along, for example, evolution and the potentiality of human progress. They are at about the same stage in thinking about morality and metaphysics as the ancient Greeks.

Four. The “Methodist atheists” — those who maintain all the qualities of niceness and good moral habits and gentle feelings associated with the followers of Wesley down the generations, but do so without believing in God. In other words, they remain indebted to inherited Christian moral sentiments, even while they seldom or never darken church doors. They have come to think that believing in God is a little like believing in Santa Claus. They have outgrown the metaphysics, but not the ethics.

Five. The merely practical atheists — that is, those who by habit remain members of a religious faith, and who share a certain pietas regarding their family gods, and continue going to church according to the old routines, but whose daily behavior and speech show that they actually live as if God does not exist. Their religiousness is formal, routine, empty — or very nearly so. Indignantly, they may insist that they are not atheists, a term they probably associate with #2 above.

Six. Those like Friedrich von Hayek, who wished he could be religious but confessed that he seemed to have no “ear” for it, just as some people have no ear for music. He felt he was an atheist by defect.

Some years ago I read a book on atheism, by a devout atheist (if that is the right word), who had found to his surprise that a large majority of those Americans who call themselves atheists actually believe in some more-than-human power, force, intelligence in all things. This is a position not altogether unlike the ancients (and the moderns) described in #3 above. The ancients did not call such persons atheists, but held them to be theists, albeit under a vague and unclear sort of deity, but intelligent and powerful and drawing all things toward the good.

Richard Rorty, acclaimed at his recent death as America’s most famous public philosopher, sometimes called himself “a nihilist with a smile.” That is, he had rejected classical rationalism, such as that described in #1 above. He recognized that our minds do aspire to rationality. Yet we find that the world of our experience, when looked at “all the way down,” is undeniably chaotic, sometimes cruel, and most of all meaningless. The world has no rational foundations. It just is. A bit of a “tale told by an idiot.”

On the other hand, in his ethical commitments Rorty never could shake the Christian dreams of his forebears. Not so long before his death he spoke of his hazy vision of the future and his sense of the holy. “My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that someday my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” Thus, Rorty is a prime example of #4 above; except that his utopia is a bit rosier than the evidence for Original Sin will allow most Christians to indulge in.

In any case, there seems to be a high proportion of atheists today whose lives are as nice and moral as Hallmark greeting cards. Some of them may dislike Christianity intensely. As the world goes, however, the ethical practices of a certain number of them — all the way up the scale from mere sentiments, to effective personal help to the poor, and to heroic self-sacrifice — are more in tune with Jewish/Christian ethics than with any other on this planet.

Thus, in answering the challenges put to Jews and Christians by atheists this season, we may concede that nonbelievers may well find in the law “written in their hearts” and recognizable by reason alone a quite decent moral code, and in ancient and modern moralists among pagans some good guidance for living rather good moral lives. Not, for the most part, saints, just good people; though among them, for sure, are some “secular saints,” of the kind observed by Albert Camus in his novel The Plague.

We may concede, even, that some atheists live better moral lives than some of those who attend Christian churches. Some of the latter may live “as if there is no God” to a greater degree than some atheists.

The only kind of atheist whose morals all of us have a right to suspect are those in #2 above: the nihilists. These are people who, as Samuel Adams wryly noted, have no first principles to prevent them from betraying their spouse — or their country. Whatever they need to do is their first principle. These are the ones of whom Dostoevsky wrote: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” G. K. Chesterton is often quoted as saying of such persons: “Those who say they do not believe in God do not believe in nothing. They believe anything.” They seem especially prone to the latest cultural hoaxes, such as imminent global freezing (“nuclear winter”) or imminent global warming.

As for the charge that those who believe in one God, the Creator who fashioned the laws of nature (“the laws of nature and nature’s God”), find it more difficult than the atheist to be tolerant, three replies are available. The first is this: Have you ever measured on the Hatred Scale the way in which atheists speak disdainfully of “deluded” Christians and Jews? Tolerance? Many do not grant even the basic respect due all intelligent and responsible human individuals — the respect of dealing with an intellectual equal.

Second, the two regimes in our time that tried totally to control thought and conscience, and were the most intolerant in history, called themselves — and were — atheist regimes.

Third, those humans who can see that some things belong to Caesar, and some to God, have an iron-sided reason to resist the tyranny of the State, on one hand, and to resist the overweening ambitions of any priestly caste, on the other. Also, seeing clearly the infinity of God’s wisdom and the puniness of their own, Jews and Christians have every reason to be humble of mind, and respectful of the truth in the mind of others, since all humans are made in the image of God, each a partial refraction of his infinite wisdom. As Reinhold Niebuhr counseled Christians: Recall that in your own truth there is always some error, and in the errors of your current opponents, some truth. Each believing Jew and Christian has solid religious grounds for being respectful of the truths uttered by others, and humble about the degree of knowledge each of them has so far attained. No one of us “has” the truth. All of us, with very limited minds indeed, are held accountable under its infinite light.

The Christmas season is a good time, then, for atheists and believers alike to meditate upon their own limitations, and to listen more respectfully to one another; each has something to learn from the other. It is a suitable time for this, because the greeting of Christmas peace was intended for all who faithfully seek the good, as best their conscience shows it to them.

Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis: Peace on earth to all humans of good will!

Published in National Review Online January 4, 2009