Thanks.For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness God requires. (James 1:20)
Leave it to old James to hit the nail on the head. Anger just doesn't get the job done, at least the way you'd like it. So why are we angry so much of the time?
I just came back from a couple of days of retreat hanging with the Benedictine monks up at St. Andrew's Abbey in the high desert of Valyermo. I love hanging out with the Benedictines. I love praying the Psalter with them, though their chant tones make me grateful for LSB. I love their lavish hospitality; I always gain a pound or two. I love their lectio divina during dinner hour. This week's reading was an account of a pilgrimage by some American Benedictine. I love the "great silence" from compline to the end of breakfast. There is something about the discipline of silence that does my talkative soul good. I especially love their rather easygoing way of accepting people on an as-you-are basis.
While I was hanging with the monks, I had plenty of time to read and reflect. I've been reading the pop atheists lately. Now there's some great reading for a monastery! I plowed through The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and am now nearly finished with Sam Harris' The End of Faith. I must admit to approaching these books with some fear and trepidation over what colossal arguments I would encounter. Now I'm not sure why I was so worried. I'd already read Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx et al thanks to a decent University of Chicago education. I was hoping for something more, or at least something profound. Oh well. There's nothing really new under the sun, as they say.
But that's not the point of this post. I'd like to extend an apology to Richard, Sam, Christopher, Daniel, and even PZ Myers for the diminished standards of my last post. Of course, it's easy to become angry when you're defensive. It's easy to be angry when Dawkins calls your God and Savior a "sky fairy." Or when Harris says that believing anything leads to violence. Or when Hitchens says that religion screws up everything in the world. Or when Dennett mocks the friends who sincerely prayed that he wouldn't die by asking them "Did you sacrifice a goat?" It's easy, even a natural reflex, to be angry.
It's easy to be angry with Richard Dawkins when he compares the catechesis of children to child abuse, or when he writes that the God of the OT is "jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pesitlential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" (The God Delusion, p. 51). Some of those words even make my spell-checker angry.
But easy doesn't justify anything. I wondered, why the anger? God can handle His detractors for Himself, all in good time, if He so chooses. He doesn't need us to defend Him. And if He has a good chuckle heaven at the hubris of humanity, what's that to me? Why do I even bother to get angry over insults to God?
I watched the debate on The God Delusion between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox, a mathematician and Christian. It's time well invested. You can watch it here, or better still, buy the DVD. The contrast between the two men over the hour and a half debate changed my attitude. I began to feel sorry for the old biologist. He seems so confident, even arrogant, when preaching to the choir at Berkeley. (Believe me, I know a thing or two about preaching to choirs!) But he looked so insecure, so anemic, so out of his league when confronted with the jovial Irishman Lennox who gave a robust witness to the historic character of the Christian faith. I would have liked to have heard these two men engage in more unstructured debate; the format seemed stifling, particularly to Dawkins who appeared to be ill prepared. What struck me most was how pathetically sad Richard Dawkins appeared, like a man on death row awaiting his last meal, and how happy Lennox seemed to be there debating his atheist colleague. It wasn't one of Richard's A-moments.
I came away from that debate with a sense of shame at my anger. What was I so mad about? So what if some atheists make fun of religion or even my religion? Must I become angry in order to prove my faithfulness? Must I pull my sword like Peter to whack off the ear of Malchus to defend gentle Jesus from the playground bullies? Atheists' mockery proves nothing, and their little syllogisms prove even less.
I started to think of how sad it must be to live in a spiritual "flatland," a world confined to three spatial dimensions and time, a world devoid of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. A world where matter and energy are all there is and the only purpose in life is to propagate your DNA. A world where someone so sublime as God can be mocked as a "flying spaghetti monster." As one who spent his college and graduate student days studying chemistry, I wondered how the noble discipline of science could have so stunted a person's imagination.
My Benedictine hosts showed me that to begin a conversation, one must accept the other person as he or she is, without any notion of changing that person. "Not by might nor by power but by my Spirit," says the Lord. I don't know why the atheists are so angry. Perhaps they have good reason to be. I know that Christians aren't always noted for their manners, much less their Jesus-like compassion for those with whom they disagree, myself included. Maybe the angry atheists are just getting back at the playground bullies. Fair enough.
Ghandi once remarked, "I don't reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It's just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ." We can't expect the other guy to put down his sword while we are swinging ours. That's true for many situations. Don't expect someone who believes in nothing to put down his sword. We're called to go first. We claim to follow the One who said, "Turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, bless those who hate you, pray for your persecutors."
So guys, really, I'm sorry about last week's snark. I'm praying for you. I know you atheists don't like it when people say that, but we don't have a choice really, since Jesus shed His blood to save you guys too.
And no, Daniel, I won't be sacrificing a goat. No need.
Thanks.
Nice post, Pastor Cwirla. And long enough to be one of mine, which adds to my pleasure in reading it