Reza Aslan, Bart Ehrman, and the Failure of Fundamentalism

Both of the two books that have been bopping around in the popular Jesus consciousness lately share a common characteristic.  There's Reza Aslan's Zealot, which I recently read and reviewed.  Then there's the latest output of Bart Ehrman.  How Jesus Became God would be on my plate if I hadn't already given him plenty of my processor time.

I have not read this work yet, but I've read lots of stuff by Ehrman.  I know from whence he comes, and this doesn't really seem to expand his schtick much.

Ehrman's a bible scholar--not a bad one, actually--whose work mostly revolves around using historical-critical method to cast doubt on the core dynamics of faith.

Doubt is at the core of his approach, because he's an agnostic now, on the hard side of it.  Meaning, his is not the doubt that resides as an integral part of an existentially authentic faith.  It's just doubt.

Like so many souls in our culture, he got his start in the fundamentalist community.  That's where he learned faith, a faith that mattered to him deeply.  The problem?  When he came into encounter with the actual historical process by which the Bible was formed and shaped, it blew a huge and irreparable hole in his belief system.  Reading his works, one still gets a sense of how cheesed he is at having been duped.  What he has now is just history, decoupled from any engagement with the transcendent.

What strikes me about both these books is that commonality.  Both Reza and Ehrman "came to faith" through the classical evangelical approach. The initial appeal was emotive, and the community into which they were received was fundamentalist. That, for both, defined their Christian journey.

And it also failed both of them completely.  When they reached a point of questioning, there were no longer answers that respected either their intelligence or reality.

Once you allow the reality of God's creation in, literalism comes apart like tissue paper in a typhoon.  That's why the walls and ramparts of presuppositional apologetics are so very high and so fiercely defended.  What lies within is as delicate and fleeting as a shadow.

And so a disappointed Reza returned to the Islam of his childhood, and Ehrman turned on the lie he knew as Christianity with the precise sword of his historian's training.

The terrible effect of fundamentalism was to inoculate both of them against the transforming power of the Gospel.  Let's set aside theology for a moment, they say, as if one can do that and not leave only a dead husk where there once was a living body.

I wish this were less common, but honestly, it happens all the time.  People think they're in encounter with the real thing, only to have their hopes destroyed and their passions made an embarrassment.  Why would they ever trust the good news again?  Or trust that the Spirit that tried to move in them was more real and more potent than what they'd been taught?

And that, perhaps more than anything, is the greatest failure of fundamentalism.

Worshipping the White Witch

As summer arrives, my first bit of reading for the season is some unfinished business from the winter.   I am, at long last, making my way through the rest of George MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons.  MacDonald, the Scots Mystic who was C.S. Lewises spiritual teacher, isn't exactly the most entertaining preacher.   His sermons bear no resemblance to the form demanded by the consumers of AmeriChrist, Inc. inspirational products.

There are no canned jokes to warm up the inadequately caffeinated crowd.  There are no stories drawn straight from 1001 Garfield Sermon Illustrations.  There are no nice neat bullet points that tell you how to apply the Three Lessons Learned to Your Life Now.  It's just smart, hard, bare-knuckled and uncompromising theology, applied directly to the forehead with all the merciless intensity of a Scots intellectual.   And if preached, they'd run for at least an hour.

I love 'em.  MacDonald burns bright like fire, and he gets God in a way that goes well beyond abstract knowledge.

Here's da ting.  The last of MacDonald's Sermons I've been reading is entitled "The Truth In Jesus," and after over 100 years, it remains as fiercely heretical today as it would have been then.  MacDonald, as a mystic, had no patience whatsoever for the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.  By this, I mean the theological framework in which Jesus has to die because God's wrath against sinful humanity must be appeased.  A blood sacrifice is demanded, and so Jesus is killed, thus releasing those who believe in him from the heck-fire that we so richly deserve.

This is pretty roots-rock stuff for many evangelicals, but MacD viewed it as monstrous and essentially pagan.  He sees it as a fundamental misunderstanding of Christ's person and teachings,  the central teachings of the apostles, and the nature of God.  For MacDonald, God is ferocious, consuming fire Love, and there's no way to reconcile God's essential nature with this theology.  And Lord ha' mercy, he's gonna be tellin' ya 'bout it.

As I read through his intense polemic, I've been wondering about the relationship between this clear and strongly held position and the place where I first learned about substitutionary atonement.

That place was, of course, Narnia.   I first read Lewises' Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by myself back when I was five.  Hey, it was 1970s Kenya, and in the absence of endless screen inputs, five year olds have time to learn to read.  From the fire and magic that is the gift of children, my memories of that reading are not of reading about Narnia, but of being in Narnia, like you remember a particularly vivid childhood dream.

I remember the Stone Table, and the hill, and the dark path leading there.  I remember watching with Lucy and Susan from a cleft as noble Aslan was led to an innocent death at the hands of Jadis and her howling mob of monsters.     That story laid the groundwork for my own theology, and my understanding of what Jesus means.  It's meant to do that.

So I got myself to wondering:  C.S. Lewis acknowledges George MacDonald as his spiritual teacher, and MacDonald radiantly, relentlessly, and repeatedly rejects the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.  If that is so, is there any connection between what C.S. Lewis teaches us as children and what MacDonald taught him?

The connection, I think, comes in who insists upon the sacrifice, on blood shed as punishment for sin.  

It is not Aslan.  It is not his ever unseen father, the Emperor over the Sea.

It's Jadis, the Last Empress of Charn, the White Witch, the emblem of worldly power and control and the form of "justice" that is written in fear and the horrible balance of suffering.

No wonder I have so much trouble with that way of understanding God.

Good Without Aslan?

One of the latest salvos in the seasonal squabbles between atheists and Christians came as more "good without god" ads have gotten pasted onto the sides of buses in Texas. This is a reprise of ads run last year in London, but given that Texans gets a bit more riled when they think you're messin' with their Jesus, it's been testier.

The default response from certain wings of Christianity when asked if you can be good without God is, of course, no.  Typically, our response has to do with folks not being saved, that nothing good can exist in folks who haven't proclaimed Jesus as Lord and Savior.  Unless you fall at the foot of The Bleedy Bloody Cross All Spattered With Gore (Hymn number 42 in the Really Old Hymnal), you're just S.O.L.  That's Salvation Out of Luck, kids.

More smugly erudite Jesus folks get into the philosophy of it, going back to teleology, ontology, and the purpose of Plato's Euthyphro Dilemma to make the case that without an noncontingent ground, there can be no meaningful definition of the good.  Lord have mercy on me, a smug and erudite sinner.

Whether you get all orthodox with the former, or...like me...tend to obscurely think the latter, things can still get testy and self-righteous.  Which defeats the purpose of the whole Jesus thing.

What strikes me, in this season when yet another Narnia movie has been released, is how far the faith has wandered from the openness to the Good you can find on the green fields of Narnia.  I don't intend to see the latest movie, not in the theatres.  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was passable, even if it leaned too heavily on the CG.  Prince Caspian just plain old bit as a movie.  Portraying Caspian as a smoldering Latin studmuffin was waaaay too much.  And it was appallingly dull, both loud and plodding.

Now the whole franchise has been sold off by Disney, with the rights transferred over to Fox.  The reviews don't make it seem worth my while, particularly given that for the first time, some significant liberties have been taken with C.S. Lewises narrative.  As a Narnian fanboy, I find this annoying.  The point of those liberties is to make it more overtly "faith-oriented," and to fold in even more martial imagery.  Given that Rupert Murdoch now owns the rights to the story, that's no surprise.  So...I'll wait until it's on BluRay.  Or not.  More likely I'll catch it in snippets as I pan through the channels on cable in six months.

In the Narnia books, though, it's clear that C.S. Lewis understood that goodness and overt statements of faith weren't always the same thing.  Narnia is a place far more willing to see the good in folks who might not have an orthodox grasp on Aslan.  Three characters from Narnia typify this attitude.

There is, for instance, the noble-if-a-tick-snooty war charger Bree, the eponymous horse from The Horse and His Boy.  Bree is quite convinced that Aslan the Lion is some sort of metaphor, certainly not a lion, representing some greater truth or reality or person, about which not much can be definitively known.  He'd be quite comfortable in an Episcopalian stable.   He is proven wrong, of course, and ends up feeling like an idiot.  But even in his liberal erudite smugness, he remains firmly and incontrovertably in the camp of the good.

Perhaps there's hope for me yet.

There is the red dwarf Trumpkin, who makes an appearance in Prince Caspian, is referenced in Dawn Treader, and is still kickin' around in The Silver Chair.  In Prince Caspian, Trumpkin is an atheist.  Or an "A-Aslanist."  Or perhaps..because "humanist" doesn't work for dwarves...just plain old "Narnian."  He believes that Aslan is a myth, an old wife's tale, and a superstition.  From his dwarvish practicality, he can see no reason that such a being actually ever existed, and he repeatedly and explicitly says as much.  He is, nonetheless, a strong, hearty, tireless, and cheerful supporter of Narnia.  When Aslan does arrive, Trumpkin gets tossed in the air a bit, but with love.  Even before Trumpkin's tossing, he's one of the good guys.  He's on the right side.

Finally, there is Emeth, the honorable young Calormene Lord from The Last Battle.   Emeth is an infidel, who worships the great and terrible Tash.  Here, Lewis makes his most pointed defense of the existence of the good outside of the bounds of the orthodox "us."  Even though Emeth has his whole life only ever worshipped Tash, his encounter with Aslan does not end up with him being kibble.  Instead, C.S. Lewis tells us that Emeth's noble life, while done in the service of Tash, nonetheless count as a life lived to the honor of Aslan.

As Aslan puts it, "...I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and no service which is not vile can be done to him."   That which is self-evidently good, noble, right and true belongs to God.  Period. Given that that name "Emeth" means "Truth" in Hebrew, Clive Staples is clearly making a point here. 

Despite many conservative Christian's embrace of Lewis for the wonderful, joyous and articulate way he proclaims Christian faith, his is not the stuff of rigid orthodoxy.  Lewis speaks a more gracious truth, one a far sight better than the shrill and closed-hearted literalism that seems to govern this benighted age. 

Ah well.  Even if he's wrong, I can imagine fewer folks I'd rather share a circle in the fundamentalist hell with than C.S. Lewis.