Reweaving the Rainbow

How Can Atheists Reject a Theology They Don't Understand?

 

That's the question I had after watching Robert Wright interview atheist cosmologist Lawrence Krauss about his new book, A Universe from Nothing. Krauss's thesis is that scientists are now discovering how it is that the universe literally could have come from nothing (as opposed to simply positing that that is what happened, as in earlier accounts of Big Bang theory).

Except it turns out that Krauss's "nothing" doesn't actually mean no "thing." Under his model, even if all the mass and energy of the universe literally came into existence from nothing (a model, as I pointed out before, that is entirely compatible with the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo), our universe would not exist as it does unless its physical laws were already in existence when the Big Bang occurred. In short, Krauss's "nothing" includes the universe's physical laws, which, of course, are things, making his "nothing" something.

When Wright points out that this definition of "nothing" is not what philosophers and theologians have in mind when they say God created the universe out of nothing (starting at the 23:00 mark), Krauss counters that medieval theologians had only a "vague and undefined sense of what nothing is." By this, he evidentally means to suggest that theology needed science to teach it what "nothing" actually means.

But that's nonsense. Granting that people in the Middle Ages knew less about the laws of the universe than we do today, they certainly knew something about them. They knew, for example, that gravity exists. Thus they did not intentionally jump off church towers for the same reason we don't intentionally jump off skyscrapers unless we're trying to commit suicide. Why? Because they knew they'd fall to the ground and probably to their death. I'll go even further and argue that the medieval understanding of gravity was actually quite sophisticated (certainly more sophistocated than the average college graduate's today). Had it not been, then medieval architects could never have invented the flying buttresses that allowed them to build church towers of such great height that jumping off them would have resulted in their death.

So our medieval ancestors clearly knew something about the physical laws of the universe. And when we read medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (b. 1225), it is clear that they believed God was the creator of everything, including the universe's physical laws. As Aquinas explains it in Contra Gentiles, Book II, Ch. 16:

Now, what has been said makes it clear that God brought things into being from no pre-existing subject, as from matter. For, if a thing is an effect produced by God, either something exists before it, or not. If not, our assertion stands, namely, that God produces some effect from nothing preexisting. If something exists before it, however, we must either go on to infinity, which is impossible in natural causes, as Aristotle proves in Metaphysics II, or we must arrive at a first being which presupposes no other. And this being can be none other than God Himself. For we proved in Book I that God is not the matter of any thing; nor, as we have shown, can there be anything other than God which is not made to be by Him.

According to Aquinas, then, there cannot be anything that is not made by God. And this does not simply mean that God created matter itself. It means both that he created its "form" (i.e., its shape and its properties, such whether it exists as a solid or liquid and whether it has a certain color, texture, etc.) and that, as the First Mover, he set it all into "motion" (Ch. 17). And modern scientists, of course, would say that the form and motion of matter cannot be understood apart from the physical laws of the universe, such as gravity, that govern it.

All of which is to say: When Aquinas said God created ex nihilo, he meant exactly that. Why Krauss doesn't know this is surprising since one of his stated goals is to show that science has somehow undermined theological accounts of creation.

So my question is this: How can you undermine a theology that you don't even understand?

What Does The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Teach Us About the Bible?

 

That's the question Sarah Sentilles explores in her review of the movie based on the popular novel:

The plot revolves around a missing girl and the serial killer believed to have murdered her who uses the Bible like a handbook. He takes passages from Leviticus—21:9 for example: The daughter of any priest, if she profanes herself by playing the harlot, she profanes her father. She shall be burned with fire—and enacts them on women’s bodies. On Jewish women’s bodies....

Passages like these should render biblical literalism impossible. Their existence illuminates that literalists always engage in selective literalism, choosing the passages that support the arguments they want to make. And what is the rubric for selective literalism other than convenience and the maintenance of oppressive power relationships? When faced with such verses—or even passages about keeping kosher or not being around women who are menstruating—many a literalist will argue something like “that was then and this is now,” while in the very next breath (I’m talking to you, Rick Santorum, and you, Michele Bachmann) they’ll insist that homosexuality is an abomination or that women should submit to their husbands. Why? Because it’s in the Bible.

I sympathize with Sentilles' views, but I think she is confused about the meaning of biblical literalism. The Bible is a collection of many different books and literary genres. The gospels, for example, are biographies of Jesus' life that purport to describe historical facts. The book of Psalms, on the other hand, is a collection of 150 religiously-themed poems.

Knowing the genre of the text you are reading is critical to interpreting it. When, for example, the Psalmist says to God, "you knit me together in my mother's womb" (139:13), we are free to read that metaphorically because we know Psalms is a book a poetry and not, for example, a medical textbook that purports to describe how fetuses develop in utero.

We have no such freedom when it comes to passages like Leviticus 21:9. The ancient Israelites believed - rightly or wrongly - that the daughters of priests who engaged in fornication deserved special punishment because of their relatively prominent position in society. The Israelite legal code, parts of which are recorded in the book of Leviticus, reflects this belief. And when it says those who violate this precept should be burned to death, it means that literally. Perpetrators are burned to death. In the same way, when a modern criminal statute says that a person who is found guilty of violating it shall be sentenced to between 1 year and 5 years of imprisonment, it means precisely that. A sentence of 2 days - or 20 years - is not permitted

It's all very cold and calculating, and there's nothing metaphorical about it. Indeed, Sentilles' attempt to read passages like Leviticus 21:9 in a non-literal manner will not only do nothing to alleviate the suffering those passages have caused over the centuries. It may cause those of us who do accept the authority of Scripture to downplay and perhaps even forget the very real harm the Bible is capable of causing (especially in the wrong hands).

Which is why I suspect what Sentilles really means is that we should acknowledge the inherent brutality of these parts of Jewish law and question whether God actually authored them. If so, that's a project no less an authority than Jesus wholeheartedly endorsed. Like the prophets before him, he had strong words to say against those who "teach[] for doctrines the commandments of men" (Matthew 15:9). He did not hesitate to denounce certain aspects of Jewish law for containing errors that violate the will of God (Mark 10:5). He publicly flouted the laws against working on the Sabbath, famously observing that God made the day of rest for the benefit of man and not the other way around (Mark 2:27). And when a crowd had gathered to stone a woman to death for committing adultery - a punishment required by Jewish law - he invited those who had not sinned to cast the first stone. When no one did so, he told the woman, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more" (John 8:11).

The only possible conclusion to draw is that Jesus did not consider Jewish law to be an accurate guide to the will of God. And if he didn't, we need not do so either.

What Do Fundamentalists Get Right?

The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall has an interesting piece about what liberal activists and academics say conservatives get right. What’s remarkable is just how familiar it all sounds. I live in Washington, D.C., where almost everyone self-identifies as liberal. And yet I can’t count how many times I’ve heard my friends confess - often in hushed tones - how they wouldn’t mind if the left did more to emphasize individual responsibility, acknowledge the social importance of good parenting, or use policy to promote the “institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family).” Actually, not even my friends, smart as they are, use the term "exoskeleton" in polite conversation. But that's one thing Jonathan Haidt, a liberal professor of psychology at UVA, is quoted as saying conservatives get right.

All of which led me to wonder what it is about fundamentalist Christianity that those of us on the so-called left side of the protestant-evangelical-catholic-orthodox spectrum of Christianity would praise. Here are my suggestions:

• Their reverance of the Bible as the living, breathing Word of God that speaks to us directly and intimately, so much so that Moses, Ruth and the woman at the well come to feel more like friends, family members and neighbors than characters in an ancient text.

• Their willingness to ask basic, pressing questions of everyday life, such as how the hell can I learn to put up with my asshole/bitch boss (though typically, of course, they do so without using profanity).

• Their gumption in calling sin, sin, and good, good, and evil, evil (even if I don't always agree with their conclusions regarding the same). All too often liberal and moderate Christians come across as timid, even neutered creatures who lack the courage of our convictions. I'll never forget the moment I realized this, when, as a teacher's assistant at Duke Divinity School, I was reading a paper about a film that featured a flawed hero who had murdered a man after discovering he'd had an affair with his wife. The murder was, the paper noted dryly, an act of which "many of us would not approve."  Indeed!

• Their awareness that Jesus did not just come to save “the poor,” if by that we mean those who are different from or have less money than we, but every single one of us, including those of us who are materially well off and about whom Jesus said: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 10:24-25). In contrast, liberal congregations tend to take it for granted that their central mission is to the “less fortunate,” an entirely secular phraseology that almost always means people other than those in attendance and that in practice turns Jesus’ beatitudes on their head (“Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.” (Luke 6:20-21; KJV)).

• The way they take church seriously, if not always in their ecclesiology, then certainly in their actual practices, such as lingering in the sanctuary after Sunday worship to catch up with one another, sharing their weekly ups and downs in Sunday school, and eating supper together on Wednesday nights (at least in the wonderful Southern Baptist I grew up in).

• Their continuing use of the King James Version of the Bible, the Bible I grew up reading and memorizing in the 1980s and 90s and which even the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens praised thus:

Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940, faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words “but if not … ” All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his sacred idol they will be flung into a “burning fiery furnace.” They made him an answer: “If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, o King. / But if not, be it known unto thee, o king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”

Can Christians Be into BDSM?

If you were in the nation's capital last weekend, then you couldn't help but notice all the Leather Daddies, Bears, Cubs, Otters, Pups and sundry other gay creatures roaming the streets. What brought them here was Mid-Atlantic Leather (MAL) Weekend, an annual gay leather/fetish event that draws thousands of attendees from around the world.  It goes without saying that most of them are involved in some aspect or another of BDSM, a subject that makes most Christians (and most "mainstream" LGBT folks, for that matter) uncomfortable.

As explained by Wikipedia:

BDSM is an erotic preference and a form of sexual expression involving the consensual use of restraint, intense sensory stimulation, and fantasy power role play. The compound initialism BDSM is derived from the terms bondage and discipline (B&D or B/D), dominance and submission (D&S or D/s), and sadism and masochism (S&M or S/M). BDSM includes a wide spectrum of activities, forms of interpersonal relationships, and distinct subcultures.  Activities and relationships within a BDSM context are characterized by the participants usually taking on complementary, but unequal roles, thus the idea of consent of both the partners becomes essential.

One of the curious things about BDSM is that, even though it is associated with a sub-culture and continues to be derided as deviant, almost all of us enjoy some aspect of domination and submission when it comes to sex. Maybe we don’t want to tie up our sexual partners or be tied up by them. But as one of my good friends from law school – a woman who was a feminist leader on campus – once confided, she rather liked it when her boyfriend “threw her around a bit” in bed. The way she said it made me suspect she saw this as something of a contradiction of her feminist ideals, if not her Catholic faith. But the sly, almost playful smile on her told me this contradiction didn’t bother her enough for her to suppress her sexual preference.

Gay men, of course, have our own various and sundry preferences. And even the majority of us who are not involved in BDSM proper continue to define ourselves in terms of which role we play in bed – top or bottom – and the power dynamic this word choice implies cannot be denied. There’s a reason gay men insult one another with derogatory terms like “nelly bottom” and “bitchy queen,” while there is no corresponding term of abuse for those who take the top or “male” role in gay sex. And that, perhaps, is one salutary effect of events like MAL: If nothing else, they give those who take the bottom or submissive role in sex a chance to celebrate this fact about themselves openly and without shame.

But the more interesting question, I think, is what we are to make of BDSM at all. In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis - who privately confessed his own sadistic sexual fantasies (a fact Evangelicals rarely acknowledge) - discusses what he delicatedly calls that “certain attitude which Venus, in her intensity, evokes from most (I believe, not all) pairs of lovers”:

This act can invite the man to an extreme, though short-lived, masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly extreme subjection and surrender. Hence the roughness, even fierceness, of some erotic play; the ‘lover’s pinch which hurts and is desired.'

It's pretty clear to me that what Lewis is describing here is the same impulse behind BDSM. Lewis goes on to argue that this domination-and-submission element of sex can be "harmless and wholesome," but only if both lovers understand that it is only a form of "play." As he puts it:

We must recognize that we have here to do with what I called the ‘Pagan Sacrament’ in sex. In Friendship, as we noticed, each participant stands for precisely himself – the contingent individual he is. But in the act of love we are not merely ourselves. We are also representatives. It is here no impoverishment but an enrichment to be aware that forces older and less personal than we work through us. In us all the masculinity and femininity of the world, all that is assailant and responsive, are momentarily focused. The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the Earth-Mother; he does play Form, and she Matter. But we must give full value to the word play. Of course neither “plays a part” in the sense of being a hypocrite. But each plays a part or role in – well, in something which is comparable to a mystery-play or ritual (at one extreme) and to a masque or even a charade (at the other).

A woman who accepted as literally her own this extreme self-surrender would be an idolatress offering to a man what belongs only to God. And a man would have to be the coxcomb [i.e., fool] of all coxcombs, and indeed a blasphemer, if he arrogated to himself, as the mere person he is, the sort of sovereignty to which Venus for a moment exalts him. But what cannot be lawfully yielded or claimed can be lawfully enacted. Outside this ritual or drama he and she are two immortal souls, two freeborn adults, two citizens…. But within the rite or drama they become a god and goddess between whom there is no equality – whose relationships are asymmetrical.

What do you think?

Was the World the Slaves Made Christian?

This excerpt from Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll sheds some light on this complicated question:

In Wilkinson County, Mississippi, an old slave gravedigger, accompanied by a young helper, asked a white stranger a question:

“Massa, may I ask you something?”

“Ask what you please.”

“Can you ‘splain how it happened in the fust place, that the white folks got the start of the black folks, so as to make dem slaves and do all de work?’

The younger helper, fearing the white man’s wrath, broke in: ‘Uncle Pete, it’s no use talking. It’s fo’ordained. The Bible tells you that the Lord fo-ordained the Nigger to work, and the white man to boss.”

“Dat’s so. Dat’s so. But if dat’s so, then God’s no fair man!”

Later on in the book, Genovese explores how the slaves came to view Christ in a way that ultimately subverted slavery, something we would do well to remember this MLK Day:

The slaves had a special and central place for Jesus, but a place that whites had difficulty recognizing. Julius Lester has given us, with a few short strokes, a convincing reading. The slaves, he writes, “fashioned their own kind of Christianity, which they turned to for strength in the constant times of need. In the Old Testament story of the enslavement of the Hebrews by the Egyptians, they found their own story. In the figure of Jesus Christ, they found someone who had suffered as they suffered, someone who understood, someone who offered them rest from their suffering.”

Moses had become Jesus, and Jesus, Moses; and with their union the two aspects of the slaves’ religious question – collective deliverance as a people and redemption from their personal sufferings – had become one through the mediation of that imaginative power so beautifully manifested in the spirituals.

Are the Sweet Chariot, Sounding Trumpets and Other Images of Southern Christianity Still Relevant?

 

When you grow up in South and your family is Baptist and you realize you're gay, you have problems.  But they are not always the problems you’d expect - something this beautiful passage from gay author Mark Doty’s memoir, Heaven’s Coast, captures as well as anything I’ve read:

I grew up in two religions.

The first one – comforting, strange, rigorous, in its way – was comprised of an astonishing and lovely set of images. It was a religion given to me primarily by my grandmother, whose East Tennessee faith had the kind of solidity and rock-depth upon which Jesus must have intended to found His church.  She was Peter’s rock, unshakable, holding us all up – or at least holding me up…. I loved her with all my heart, and everything that was hers:  the green rocking chair, a fruitcake tin filled with swirled peppermint candies, the Bible with the words of Jesus printed in red, like holidays on a calendar. She would set me up on her lap and, rocking all the while, read Bible verses to me. I’m not sure if I remember especially her readings from Revelation or if it simply feels to me now, whenever I hear someone mention a phrase like “last days” or “apocalypse,” that the scent of her – lavender, peppermint, and clean old dresses – and the texture of her clothes, the Bible’s leatherette cover and onionskin pages, are forever commingled with those words; some essence of her imbues them.

It was she who presented me with my first religion, which was the religion of images, and they were given to me in Bible verses and in the songs we sang on the porch swing, summer nights: the sweet chariot coming to carry us home, the moon turning to blood, the angels sounding the trump so that all the dead would clap hands and arise, the thin veil of this world – thin as her sprig-scattered skirt! – parting at last and opening into a world we need not fear, though it would be awesome, a world made true and just and bright and eternally resonant as the songs we sang….

I don’t think I had any awareness of the second religion, the codes of explanation and prohibition, until after her death….

Are Evangelicals Real Conservatives?

So says the theologian D.G. Hart, whose book From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin:Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism is reviewed by Jordan Hylden in this month’s First Things.  Money quote:

As Hart explains, evangelicals began in the nineteenth century as zealous reformers and social gospellers, and today they are only reverting to type. They believe in conversion, unexpected revival, and the timeless truth of the Bible. And so, more often than not, they tend to sit crossways to traditions and established institutions, to get impatient with gradualism and compromise, and to trouble the status quo with sweeping, radical reforms drawn directly from the pages of Scripture.

The lesson, at least as Hart (and Hylden) would have it, is that Evangelicals would be better off if they became more conservative in their outlook and started paying more attention to their own local parishes, schools, and neighborhoods than national politics.  So far, so good.  But then Hylden goes on to repeat Richard John Neuhaus's critique that "evangelicals had still not learned how to translate their biblically formed convictions into public political arguments."  The point being, one is left to surmise, that they ought to do so because political arguments that effectively change American culture are worth making.

But I wonder.  The way I read the New Testament, Jesus did not call us to reform society, whether through liberal or conservative means.  He called us to start a new society, one that would not rely on the sword (or vote) for its survival, but on the promises of God.  Jesus called this society the church.  And if you read what the New Testament says about the church, it was anything but conservative.  That’s why those who joined it and were faithful to its mission were persecuted and martyred.

But neither was the church “liberal” as we would understand that term today.  Saint Paul had many negative things to say about the Greco-Roman world in which he lived.  But his answer to those problems was not to petition the Emperor for reform.  Or to convene a convention of likeminded folks to establish a new political order.  Or to write long treatises addressed to the Pagan world showing exactly where their political and ethical thinking had gone awry in the hope that such educational efforts would eventually set them aright. 

Paul's answer was at once more mundane and, history has shown, more effective.  It was this:

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Cor. 2:1-8; KJV)

This is something those of us who are trying to change the church's mind about homosexuality and same-sex marriage would do well to remember.

If the Universe Comes from Nothing, Do We Still Need God?

Cosmologist Laurence M. Krauss, whose new book A Universe From Nothing comes out this month, tells Sam Harris the answer is no:

The old idea that nothing might involve empty space, devoid of mass or energy, or anything material, for example, has now been replaced by a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles, popping in and out of existence in a time so short that we cannot detect them directly. I then go on to explain how other versions of “nothing”—beyond merely empty space—including the absence of space itself, and even the absence of physical laws, can morph into “something.” Indeed, in modern parlance, “nothing” is most often unstable. Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur.

Now, having said this, my point in the book is not to suggest that modern science is incompatible with at least the Deistic notion that perhaps there is some purpose to the Universe (even though no such purpose is manifest on the basis of any of our current knowledge, and moreover there is no logical connection between any possible “creator” and the personal God of the world’s major religions, who cares about humanity’s destiny). Rather, what I find remarkable is the fact that the discoveries of modern particle physics and cosmology over the past half century allow not only a possibility that the Universe arose from nothing, but in fact make this possibility increasingly plausible. Everything we have measured about the universe is not only consistent with a universe that came from nothing (and didn’t have to turn out this way!), but in fact, all the new evidence makes this possibility ever more likely.

What's remarkable is that Krauss apparently does not understand that everything he says is exactly what one would expect scientists to find if the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo were true.  That doctrine teaches – and has taught at least since the second century – that God created the universe out of nothing.  As expressed in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215:

We firmly believe and simply confess that there is only one true God, ... creator of all things invisible and visible, spiritual and corporeal; who by his almighty power at the beginning of time created from nothing (de nihilo condidit) both spiritual and corporeal creatures.

In other words, the universe is not some sort of physical offshoot of God (creatio ex deo), as many ancient myths posited.  Nor did God create the universe from pre-existing material (creatio ex materia), the way a sculptor turns a stone into a work of art.  If Christians believed either of those things, then Krauss's arguments might give us pause.  But we don't.  We believe God created the entire universe - including all of the laws of physics that Krauss is discussing - from nothing.  It therefore should not surprise us to find that this same universe shows signs of having been created out of nothing. 

Not that this doctrine makes any kind of intuitive sense.  In our experience, nothing comes from nothing, and for that reason most Greek and Roman philosophers rejected it (Latin: ex nihilo nihil fit) - a fact that, incidentally, caused medieval theologians a great deal of distress. 

Anyhow, it's nice to see science validating what Christians have said all along.  It's just a pity – and something of an embarrassment – that Krauss apparently knows so little about theology.  To paraphrase Dorothy Sayers, it's one thing to reject Christianity because you do not find its doctrines believable; quite another to reject it when you haven't a clue what it is you are rejecting.  But, then again, maybe Krauss's ignorance is not so surprising given the fact that most scientists, like most people, have no more than a sixth grade understanding of theology.