Atheist Delusions, The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
Atheist Delusions The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
Currently it is fashionable to be devoutly undevout. Religion's most passionate antagonists — Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others — have publishers competing eagerly to market their various denunciations of religion, monotheism, Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. But contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon profound conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history or even outright historical ignorance: so contends David Bentley Hart in this bold correction of the distortions. One of the most brilliant scholars of religion of our time, Hart provides a powerful antidote to the New Atheists' misrepresentations of the Christian past, bringing into focus the truth about the most radical revolution in Western history.
Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the "Age of Reason" was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reason's authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Nietzsche Is Rolling Over in His Grave
David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale, 2009). $28.00, 253 pages.
Over the past five years, atheists–some of whom grandiosely describe themselves as "Brights"–published a number of screeds against religion that, despite being more rhetorical than rational, nevertheless managed to sell briskly and convince (or confirm the pre-existing convictions of) a few people that unbelief is the way to go when it comes to religion.
Well, maybe. Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart admits, "I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general." He seems especially partial to Friedrich Nietzsche, for example.
Then again, maybe not. Whatever the merits of Nietzsche's insights, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are no Nietzsches. Of them, Hart writes: "atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism."
I wish I had written that sentence.
One might mistakenly assume, from what I've written so far, that Hart's book is a point-by-point refutation of the Dawkins-Dennett-Harris-Hitchens Axis of Unbelief. One might be wrong, however. Instead, Hart essays this purpose:
"My chief ambition in writing is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting; how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues."
In other words, the birth of Christianity was a revolution: "a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good."
Negatively, Hart goes on to argue that–contrary to the popular picture of the modern period as an age of liberation from medieval superstitions and oppressions–"the modern age's grand narrative of itself" is vastly overstated and even dangerous, hiding, as it does, the greatest era of barbarity in human history. The self-described atheist "Brights" may dun "religion" for its Crusades and Inquisitions, but those things hold no candle in sheer killing power to the gulag, laogai, and killing field.
To argue his thesis–in both its positive and negative aspects–Hart takes us on a historical journey of the Patristic Era, when the clash between Christian theism and Greco-Roman paganism first occurred. He shows us the Pauline demystification of the powers and principalities that peppered the pagan universe. He contrasts the tragic pagan spirit with the comic Christian spirit, the former filled with resigned despair at the cruelty of fate, the latter infused with hope in a God who saves. He shows, through a fascinating discussion of early Christian theological debates over Trinity and Incarnation, how the patristic theologians created the modern conception of personhood, and how Christian theology endowed even the lowliest of persons with dignity, unlike pagan ideology. He demonstrates that Christian theology liberated history from a chronicle of endless cycles of rises and falls and imbued human action with moral import and eschatological trajectory. And over and over again, he demonstrates how love animated Christians' actions in the world, at least in theology, if not always in actual practice.
In a sense, Hart's book is a historical representation of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity, although this time in its defense of that same religion. Nietzsche slammed Christianity for undermining the pagan "Superman" with its insipid love of the low-born, uneducated, sick and needy. He despaired lest the triumph of Christianity leave a post-Christian era of "Last Men" without the wherewithal to traduce Christian values, having become so enslaved to them. Nietzsche knew that one could not dispense with Christian metaphysics and yet retain Christian morals. Hart knows this too. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens don't. They want to retain the good effects of the Christian revolution without their cause. Hart won't let them.
If you want Christian morals–a concern for rights, for the poor, for the wellbeing of the weak and innocent–you must have Christian metaphysics. Christianity created the modern concept of human being. A post-Christian world is a post-human one as well.
Atheist Delusions is well-written, even if its sentences can run to several lines. It is historically insightful, even if it wears its historical learning lightly. And it is utterly devastating to the standard atheist claim that the history of Christianity is a history of irrationality and oppression. Christians have, no doubt, had their moments. But the original revolution of Christian theology in the first four centuries of the Common Era lives on, ironically, in the moral aspirations and moralistic critiques of the atheists who don't understand or are unwilling to take their metaphysics to their logical conclusion.
Somewhere, Nietzsche is rolling over in his grave that he's stuck with such insipid thinkers as Dawkins et al, while the best advocate of his understanding of the relationship between Christianity and Western culture believes in the God and Father of Jesus Christ.
1 Star The God Delusion Wins. This was a poor derivitive.
More nonsense from a nonsense feasting subset of humans who rely more upon the R-complex portin of the brain and less upon the cerebral cortex. I read about 1/2 of this drivel and can only say what I always say to these blathering screeds.
If you believe in the contents of the Bible as literally true , then you believe in slavery, misogyny, murdering babies and non virgins of those who believe differently, you believe in trying to kill your children because you hear voices, you believe diseases are caused by an angry god as opposed to germs, you believe that Lot was a good and holy man (despite having sex with his own daughters). You believe the illiterate ancient ramblings of men who thought the Earth was flat supercedes the fruits of scientific endeavor in voracity.
Please fly across the Atlantic Ocean on a faith based airplane rather than a scienticically based plane such as I would prefer. And please do it soon. As Darwin has shown your genes are hindering our evolution.
5 Stars God-man or man-god?
Some books are important because of new ideas they contain. Others are important because they advance insightful or even revisionary interpretations that manage to cast a real light on long-standing aspects, artifacts and affectations of our culture. And finally some books are important, not because of new ideas or new interpretations, not because theirs is a loud but finely wrought polemical shout or even because they come before us as the latest in a by now routinely labeled flow of 'revolutionary perspectives', but simply because they are intended to make us think and to do so in deeper and unexpectedly wiser ways.
This book by David Bentley Hart is such a work. It is not intended to be a critical riposte to the ranks of what he terms the 'new atheists' (Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens et al.), whose arguments in favor of unbelief he might be more willing to respect if they were not in his opinion so disappointingly vapid and critically incomplete. He says that from these men, "The best we can now hope for are arguments pursued at only the most vulgar of intellectual levels, couched in an infantile and carpingly pompous tone, and lacking all but the meagerest traces of historical erudition or syllogistic rigor…" (p. 220). Mr. Hart is correct in his complaint that these 'new atheists' are content to produce books that merely include references to selected moral and intellectual failings of historical Christianity in order that these might serve as a backdrop for their own preaching of extraordinarily doctrinaire (and demonstrably incoherent) versions of materialism and secularism. It leaves him unimpressed precisely because their approach does not even begin to do analytical justice not just to the historical or moral record of Christianity but also and perhaps even more importantly to the very antidotes these men are prescribing for our post-Christian world–his complaint amounts to the objection that if they are critically delinquent about Christianity, then they are even more so when it comes to the content of their own ideas.
This book makes one think because the breadth of the author's intellectual vision demands it. Part of the poverty displayed by those who most fervently embrace the modernist catechism is the relative smallness of their thought, their inability to venture beyond the narrowly drawn boundaries of a worldview that has, for example, reduced science to a myopic materialism and relegated philosophical thought in general to a smug historicism. Against these petty perspectives of modernity Mr. Hart brings the full depth of his learning and, compared to the pamphleteers whom he is challenging here, a noticeably greater degree of critical honesty and intellectual self-discipline. I was struck by his consistent ability to comment in a refreshingly intelligent, critically balanced, and discerning manner on ideas, trends, and outcomes whether these be the rough stuff of history or what belongs to the levels of our metaphysical imagination.
Mr. Hart wishes that we take the broadest possible view of things, that we be willing to see events and ideas in terms of their real historical connections AND their equally real differences, and that in so doing we be able to say a thing or two about what makes something like the emergence of Christian civilization the truly unique development that it was. While it is true that Mr. Hart's motives in writing this book are partly polemical, it is even more true that the bigger impulse involved in his effort is the wish for us to see the historical, intellectual, theological, and philosophical uniqueness of Christianity and its unprecedented impact in the development of Western civilization, that Christendom's advent and rise truly represented a 'revolution' in the history of the human spirit, and that this has profoundly and lastingly shaped who we are and what we at least for the time being continue to be.
And in this direction he is no mere Christian apologist nor is he a self-satisfied partisan of religious belief. His account includes acknowledgement of all the ways in which Christianity has compromised itself and rejected its own ideals and precepts. But the lasting critical value of such inclusions (and when needed he delves into far greater and more incisive detail than his opponents) is that it allows the historical investigator to see what has actually changed and what did not change with the coming of Christianity, and to see those two aspects in a real and MEANINGFUL tension with each other. The final value of Mr. Hart's book lies in the way it hopes to make us think about this 'Galilean' faith not at the level favored and (according to his analysis) REQUIRED by the cheap historical polemics and vulgar philosophizing of the 'new atheists', but rather in ways that will allow us to appreciate the real and still common sources of our humanity that came to us by way of the most outrageous proclamation the world has ever heard.
4 Stars A Sensible Rebuttal to Senseless Atheism
David Bentley Hart, in his usual take-no-prisoners snarkiness, points out the logical flaws and gross inconsistencies in the New Atheism – writers on religion such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. Interestingly, Hart does not just deconstruct their arguments (which are really shooting fish in a barrel) but provides an alternate history – the history of the early Christian Church, a minority pacifist movement which did more to help the poor and needy than any other institution before or since. Hart readily admits the weaknesses and exploitation of Christianity, but points out that at its best, it made more of a difference in the world than any other institution.
5 Stars Atheist Distractions
Apparently David Bentley Hart had two mandates when writing this book. The first is to refute or at the least undercut the current, intellectually shoddy popularisers of atheism barnstorming best-seller lists. The second is to propose a metanarrative of Western history, AD, that attributes the chief virtues of its character and institutions to Christianity: "Much of modernity should be understood not as a grand revolt against the tyranny of faith, not as a movement of human liberation and progress, but as a counterrevolution, a reactionary rejection of a freedom which it no longer understands, but upon which it remains parasitic" (p. 108). Although the book begins and ends with the cold logical contemptuous verve of scholarly dismissal for which Hart has become justly notorious, he is far far more interested in the second purpose than the first.
This should not surprise. His opinion of atheists is so low that he cannot stomach subjecting himself to discussion on their terms. So his chapters often have a characteristic twin structure. At some point within the chapter he will engage the work of a notable atheist, point out flaws in the argument that appear to him significant (not necessarily insurmountable), then dismiss the entire discussion (including his own response) as tangential to his main thesis, that is to say, what he thinks is really going on. The rest of the chapter will tackle his second purpose. His problem with atheists is not (merely) that they argue badly (cf Christopher Hitchens in my favourite sentence of the book, "whose talent for intellectual caricature somewhat exceeds his mastery of consecutive logic" and whose recent book "raises the wild non sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method" [p. 4]) but that they are arguing using entirely wrong presuppositions and categories. They are climbing ladders up the wrong trees. They are headed with speed in fruitless directions, inhabiting meaningless topoi. Such a rhetorical posture is exhilarating. Perhaps only Hart among contemporary Christian thinkers has the Messianic confidence to swim against the strong current of contemporary scholarship all by himself and take a reader with him. The thrill of reading these pages is gnostic. Hart alone has the truth and is revealing it to you.
I happen to think Hart is right, on the whole, chiefly because he is much smarter than I am and says quite well things that I have already intuited. I am on his side and therefore love this book. Whether you will love it remains to be seen. Much depends upon whether you share certain of his/our presuppositions. I am not sure what power of persuasion this book has. At the least, it seems to me to show that, if you are willing to accept (even for the sake of argument) the presupposition that the Christian God is at work in history the way the Christian Bible says He is, a historiography that hangs together and makes sense is possible. Not certain, not inevitable, but possible. Whether a similar atheist or Islamic metanarrative is possible is a question far beyond the scope of this book, no matter what snide remarks Hart may make to the opposite effect. Its persuasion may stand or fall on its vigorous use of historical facts. The pages are jammed with anecdotes and the occasional generalized statistic, most of which are not footnoted. Historians may pick holes in his interpretations, but if his facts are what he says they are he has a strong case to make. Within my own areas of expertise, his reading of the medieval period is on a much stronger footing than his reductively political reading of the Reformation.
Although the books are far different in many ways (not least in tone!), reading this book was for me an experience much like reading G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. Someone smart, entertaining, and rhetorically aware compiles a case that Christian historiography makes sense. In order to do that you must jettison or marginalize most contemporary readings, a task Hart takes up with relish. But in the end, Hart's emphasis is exactly right: any lasting value of this book must come from its second purpose. Shake what can (and ought to) be shaken all you want, but only so that what cannot be shaken may remain.
Related posts:
- Reason, Faith and Revolution – Reflections on the God Debate, The Terry Lectures Series
- The Portable Atheist Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
- The Irrational Atheist Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins Harris and Hitchens
- Atheist Universe – The Thinking Persons Answer to Christian Fundamentalism
- Can a True Christian Become an Atheist?
- Atheist Universe The Thinking Persons Answer to Christian Fundamentalism
- God – A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist Point Counterpoint Series (Oxford England)
- The Dawkins Delusion – Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine
- 1 Atheist 1 Voice
- Christians and Atheist Signs – One Claims the Atheist Messages Are Hate Speech
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The saddest thing about Christianity is this: If you let go of the belief in a literal devil/Satan/Lucifer/Beelzebub, the core of the religion, along with the moral codes based on the belief in such a creature, collapses as a house of cards. One does not have to be an atheist to recognize that fact. Without Satan, the Christian plan of salvation dissolves into the ethers. In order for the Christian ethic to make any real sense, Satan must stand at its pinnacle. He, not Jesus, is the linchpin of the Faith. If he goes, that's the end of Christendom as we've known it. And he's fading fast. To continue to believe in the Evil Gnome is madness.
Atheism, however, does not fare any better. It collapses as a house of cards the minute one understands the real premise of evolution: first there was nothing; then rocks turned to meat and started to think.
I mean, really!