Gunning for God (23 page)

We would not wish our children to be degraded to machines. Nor will God similarly degrade human beings. It is worth just pointing out in passing that there is a strong current of atheistic thought that does just that — it degrades human free will to an illusion.

C. S. Lewis wrote: “If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will — that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings — then we may take it that it is worth paying.”
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Why? What reason is there to think it is worth paying? Is the price not obviously too high?

I believe the answer lies in another, supremely costly, suffering —the cross of Christ.

THE MEANING OF THE CROSS OF CHRIST

Let me try, first of all, to explain one aspect of that answer by means of an experience I had some years ago when teaching in Eastern Europe at the time of the Cold War. I joined a group of visitors to be shown around a large synagogue. As we entered, I fell into conversation with a woman from South America, who told me she was there to try to gain some idea of her identity — perhaps to find out something about some of her relatives who had perished in the Holocaust. In the synagogue there was a special exhibition devoted to the festivals that were part of the calendar of the nation of Israel: from Passover to the Feast of Tabernacles. A rabbi was explaining these festivals, which are still celebrated today; and I was doing my best to translate for my new acquaintance. Concentrating on that task, I did not at first notice the mock-up of a doorway that stood in the centre of the exhibition. But when the rabbi reached that point in his tour, I saw not only the doorway but also the ugly words that stood above it: “
Arbeit macht frei
” (work makes free). It was a mock-up of the main gate to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz — a place that I have visited several times. Behind it, that is, through this door in the synagogue, there were photographs of the horrific medical experiments carried out on children by the infamous Dr Josef Mengele in the death camp. At that juncture my acquaintance suddenly moved into the doorway and put out her arms to touch both sides of it. She said: “And what does your religion make of this?” — earlier she had discovered that I believed in God.

She spoke loudly enough for several others to pause and look in our direction. What was I to say? What could I say? She had lost her parents and many relatives in the Holocaust. I had young children at the time and could scarcely bear to look at the Mengele photographs, because of the sheer horror of imagining my children suffering such a fate. I had nothing in my experience or in my family history that was remotely parallel to the horror that her family had endured.

But still she stood in the doorway waiting for an answer. This is what I eventually said: “I would not insult your memory of your parents by offering you simplistic answers to your question. What is more, I have young children and I cannot even bear to think how I might react if anything were to happen to them, even if it were far short of the evil that Mengele did. I have no easy answers; but I do have what, for me at least, is a doorway into an answer.”

“What is it?” she said.

“You know that I am a Christian. That means – and I know it is difficult for you to follow me here – that I believe that Yeshua
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is the messiah. I also believe that he was God incarnate, come into our world as saviour, which is what his name “Yeshua” means. Now I know that this is even more difficult for you to accept. Nevertheless, just think about this question – if Yeshua was really God, as I believe he was, what was God doing on a cross?

“Could it be that God begins just here to meet our heartbreaks, by demonstrating that he did not remain distant from our human suffering, but became part of it himself? For me, this is the beginning of hope; and it is a living hope that cannot be smashed by the enemy of death. The story does not end in the darkness of the cross. Yeshua conquered death. He rose from the dead; and one day, as the final judge, he will assess everything in absolute fairness, righteousness, and mercy.”

There was silence. She was still standing, arms outstretched, forming a motionless cross in the doorway. After a moment, with tears in her eyes, very quietly but audibly, she said: “Why has no one ever told me that about my messiah before?”

There are no simplistic answers to the hard questions thrown up by human suffering. The answer that Christianity gives is not a set of propositions or a philosophical analysis of the possibilities — it is, rather, a Person who suffered.

But it is not simply a Person who suffered to show solidarity with us in our suffering. It went far deeper than that. The unique claim of Christianity is that, on the cross, Jesus suffered something very much worse than crucifixion — he suffered to atone for sin. As the old hymn says, “He died that we might be forgiven.”

New Atheism, however, finds that concept reprehensible…

CHAPTER 6

IS THE ATONEMENT MORALLY REPELLENT?

“You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

St Matthew

“For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

St Mark

“Ask yourself the question: how moral is the following? I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago, without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy eternal life.”

Christopher Hitchens

Richard Dawkins correctly recognizes that the atonement is the “central doctrine of Christianity”, but he regards it as “vicious, sadomasochistic and repellent”.
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The sad thing about this reaction is that atheism, by its very definition, has absolutely nothing to offer here. It leaves us in a broken world without a glimmer of ultimate hope. Yet, in spite of the hopelessness of their position, many prominent atheists content themselves with crude, dismissive, and puerile caricatures of the very message that, for centuries, has brought hope, forgiveness, peace of mind and heart, and power for living to multitudes of ordinary men and women.

This is a decidedly unimpressive stance on the part of those who keep telling us that they are interested in rational thought and the assessment of evidence. Dismissing ideas by caricature is a hallmark of lazy superficiality. And yet caricatures can sometimes help us pinpoint underlying misunderstandings.

So let us look at some of the caricatures to see what can be learned from them. Dawkins first objects that the “Christian focus is overwhelmingly on sin sin sin sin sin sin sin. What a nasty little preoccupation to have dominating your life.”
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But sin, though it certainly can be very nasty, is not a little preoccupation: it is a major preoccupation that dominates the world. It is the root cause of tyrannies, wars, genocide, murder, exploitation, financial crises, injustice; of international, societal, and family breakdown; of incalculable unhappiness due to lying, cheating, slander, bullying, stealing, domestic violence, and every form of crime, and so on and on and on and on and on and on and on. What is overwhelming (to use Dawkins’ word) is the horrendous destructiveness of sin, daily forcing us to admit the bitter fact, as written long ago, that “the wages of sin is death”.
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The New Atheists have to face sin every bit as much as the rest of us. Any philosophy, such as theirs, that trivializes or ignores sin is sheer fantasy. It is also dangerous fantasy. For history is littered with disastrous attempts to establish an earthly paradise without facing human sin — and those attempts have usually added immeasurably to the burden of human misery and suffering.

For theologian Nicholas Lash of Cambridge, Dawkins’ complaint raises the suspicion that Dawkins has not read very widely in the early church fathers. Lash cannot resist a bit of irony:

How lamentable of the Fathers to have been preoccupied with the damage done by human beings to themselves, to others, and to the world of which we form a part, through egotism, violence and greed; through warfare, slavery, starvation! What a wiser atheist than Dawkins might at least agree to be a terrifyingly dark tapestry of inhumanity, Christians call “sin”, knowing all offences against the creature to be disobedience against the Creator.
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The fact is that the Christian message has something both unique and profound to say about this matter of sin. I suspect that the real reason for the superficiality of much atheist reaction is not that they do not see sin as a problem. It is because they have no solution. It is also because the very word “sin” instinctively raises spectres in their minds that threaten their naturalistic worldview: it makes them think of God, of Christ, of his death on the cross, of his resurrection. Their instinct is correct; for sin, in the first place, has to do with our relationship with God — its disruption and repair.

What is more, to say with Dawkins that the Christian focus is “overwhelmingly” on sin is entirely to misunderstand the seriousness of the situation. Most of us, if we got cancer, would find that fact at once becoming the central focus of our lives. Furthermore, we would expect the overwhelming focus of our doctors and consultants to be on that cancer, in the hope of curing the disease and restoring us to health, so that our focus could then be directed, no doubt “overwhelmingly”, elsewhere.

Sin is like a cancer: it eats up the possibility of real peace, joy, and happiness. The reason Christianity has so much to say about it is not because of morbid preoccupation. It is because Christianity offers us both a realistic diagnosis of the problem of human sin, and a solution to it that brings new, satisfying, and meaningful life with it. Atheism offers neither.

ORIGINAL SIN

In particular, Richard Dawkins vehemently disagrees with the doctrine of atonement:

But now the sado-masochism, God incarnated himself as a man, Jesus, in order that he should be tortured and executed in
atonement
for the hereditary sin of Adam. Ever since Paul expounded this repellent doctrine, Jesus has been worshipped as the
redeemer
of all our sins. Not just the past sin of Adam: future sins as well, whether future people decided to commit them or not!… I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which has dulled our objectivity. If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment…? Progressive ethicists today find it hard to defend any kind of retributive theory of punishment, let alone the scapegoat theory — executing an innocent to pay for the sins of the guilty. In any case (one can’t help wondering), who was God trying to impress? Presumably himself — judge and jury as well as execution victim. To cap it all, Adam, the supposed perpetrator of the original sin, never existed in the first place: an awkward fact — excusably unknown to Paul but presumably known to an omniscient God (and Jesus, if you believe he was God?) — which fundamentally undermines the premise of the whole tortuously nasty theory. Oh, but of course, the story of Adam and Eve was only ever
symbolic
, wasn’t it?
Symbolic?
So, in order to impress himself, Jesus had himself tortured and executed, in vicarious punishment for a symbolic sin committed by a non-existent individual? As I said, barking mad, as well as viciously unpleasant.
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A similar sentiment is expressed in the following statement that appears at the end of a Christmas essay on the King James Version of the Bible: “Let’s celebrate the 400th anniversary of this astonishing piece of English literature. Warts and all — for I have not mentioned… the Pauline obscenity of every baby being born in sin, saved only by the divine scapegoat suffering on the cross because the Creator of the universe couldn’t think of a better way to forgive everybody.”
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Though saddened by such crude misrepresentation, I am not surprised at it. For it has been so from the beginning. The message of the crucified Christ, as Paul pointed out in the very earliest days of Christianity, was and still is: “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles”.
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By their mockery the New Atheists unwittingly prove those words to be true — an observation that gives me no pleasure.

Dawkins covers a wide range of topics in the above quote: the atonement, theories of punishment, forgiveness, and the historical origin of sin; and we shall address all of them in due course. The logical place to start is with the question of sin. The New Atheists do not understand the Christian message of the cross and salvation, because they do not understand the seriousness of human sin. They mock the former because they have trivialized the latter. However, when we cease to make light of sin, we discover that it infects all of us. Sin is universal.