THE SCANDAL OF GOD:
WHY FUNDAMENTALISTS (THE RELIGIOUS AND THE ATHEIST KIND) HAVE IT ALL WRONG
The impetus to write this book came after a public conversation broadcast on local public radio in San Francisco with Christopher Hitchens about his book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I enjoyed our conversation and afterwards I wondered whether it might be worthwhile to take on the new atheists. I had a lot of misgivings. The issue was already getting a bit stale, and I was realizing more and more that I really didn’t care whether people believed in God or not, which may seem an odd admission for a priest. Religious people got into trouble when they tried – about three hundred years ago – to treat religion as if it were like science – an explanation of how God runs the world. When religion sets itself up as if it were a scientific explanation of the world, it looks increasingly ridiculous. That’s why I think that, at this moment in history, arguing about whether God exists or not is a waste of time. But I was still left with the question, what did I care about? Had I given my life up to an illusion? Had it all been a waste of time? What did I really care about?
Not long after my conversation with Christopher Hitches, I began my retirement from being dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. My wife and I flew to Singapore and enjoyed having over two months at sea on a container ship to “nowhere”. I say to “nowhere” because while we stopped at wonderful sounding ports – Shanghai, Nagoya, Kobe, Pusan, Montevideo, Santos and Rio – we had little or no opportunity to experience these places for very long. Staying in port costs the ships money, so the turn-around was made as fast as possible. I’ve languished outside Shanghai but haven’t seen it. I’ve spent two hours in a shopping mall in Durban, South Africa, and had coffee at Starbucks in Kobe. The trip gave us the opportunity to experience the world-as-shopping-mall, the globe as one great engine of consumption. The ship became the container of all my questions.
We were given the great gift of time, punctuated by hours of DVDs and books stored in Kindles – hours of evidence about “the human condition” and hours to digest and think about it. The list of books and DVDs was pretty arbitrary but there were common threads through them all: meaning-of-life stuff, what’s-a-human-being stuff, mangled-theology stuff, sex-and-power stuff, greed-and-politics stuff – all the perennial and unanswered questions that human beings ask. Very little of it was overtly religious. A lot of it was a critique/satire on American/Western consumerism. Imagine hours of TV shows like House, Six Feet Under, Thirty Rock, Monk and four seasons of Battlestar Galactica. Not to mention hours of Masterpiece Theater (Jane Austen, Queen Victoria and the Scarlet Pimpernel).
I was particularly struck by the series Battlestar Galactica. The religious element was divided into two. On one side was a group fed by a pot pourri of vague Greek mythology with characters saying, “My gods!” instead of “My God!” On the other side was a woozy and brain-dead monotheism (or, better, monism) with a mixture of machinery and sex. But the show raised all the questions about our confusion about our nature and expressed the tension between biological and cultural evolution. In the middle of the sex, mayhem and fantasy were deep questions about the evolution of consciousness, what makes a human being human, what might the next stage in our evolution be? Perhaps the cylons (humanistic robots – don’t ask) are the breakthrough into the next stage of what it might be to be human. On the other hand, the chances of our continuation and survival are slim unless . . . Battlestar Galactica was an attempt to respond to the “unless”.
The need to commit ourselves to a great conversation to probe those questions is much more than a call to an idle chat over a cup of coffee. Undoubtedly, that’s why Battlestar Galactica has captured the imagination of so many. The series makes you wonder about a possible human future. This book is a contribution to the conversations about our future together. It’s not unlike going on an archeological dig – layers of civilizations and artifacts, tablets and scattered inscriptions – a psychological and spiritual excavation to discover clues as to our identity which includes the search for “God” which, at the very least, is a code word for the disturbing and radical openness of our identity.
The famous Marxist dictum that religion is “the opiate of the people” speaks to the need for a comforting, justifying, all-encompassing narrative. We need stories to provide us with the illusion that things make sense. But religion is not only an opiate. It isalso “the heart of the heartless world”. Does “having a heart” mean living with an illusion?
For some of us the quest for meaning is – whether the route is science or religion – a drug. The quest is an opiate and we’re all addicts. Do we only have two choices: cynicism or delusion? And there’s the rub. We cannot do without stories and they are notoriously unreliable. There I was in the self-contained world of a freighter, waking up more deeply to the fact that I’d been living in a play, or a series of plays, in which I had played various roles: priest, husband, father, divorcé, sinner, lover and failure. Yes, there were moments too of grace and glory, laughter and joy. The question that kept coming into my head and one I wanted to ask Christopher Hitchens was, “What play are we all in?” Or “How do we rewrite the one we’re in now?” We are all caught in our own interpretations and the interpretations of others and yet we cannot do without them. Convinced of the truth of our view of things, we suppress the fact that it is a necessary construction. So, we are caught between construction and deconstruction and, perhaps, faith is the third place of nakedness beyond all interpretations?
Our love of stories, novels, movies, adventures, science fiction, romance, horror, sit-coms is a good place to start. No-one (at least most of us) takes them literally, yet they play an important part in helping us interpret the world and simply get through the day. They provide the architecture of our thoughts and feelings. In fact, some of us don’t know how to act – to make love, be angry, grieve, laugh – until we’ve seen someone do it on television. We’re great copiers and mimics.
Nevertheless, many of us (in spite of living inside a narrative) have swallowed the lie that science somehow is THE privileged language – the only language that’s really, really true. We’re not good at seeing that we all live inside a story – not necessarily a good one and that knowing what story’s playing itself out inside us might help us move into a truer one. That’s why I love reading fiction for the sake of truth. Those nine weeks on the container ship allowed me to plunge into story after story after story. It was a relief to realize that there are stories out there other than my own; and when I let those other narratives get a foothold, the story I’ve been telling myself about myself is threatened and challenged. When I am open to it, my story changes and deepens. So . . . after our time at sea, my conviction that fiction is vital was reinforced.
Discerning the truth in fiction is the antidote to literalism and fundamentalism in both their religious and atheistic forms. We need to be as clear as we can about things that really happened – in the real world, yet “what really happened” is subject to endless interpretation.
All we have is language and the unreliable organ we call the imagination. Our frustration is that these instruments are only capable of either stating the trivial or pointing inadequately to that which cannot be spoken. George Steiner in an essay on The Burning Bush writes of the “ambiguous loftiness and terror of the unsayable.”[i] The God of Moses cannot be said, cannot be put into words. I am Who I am, I will be Who I will be. This is why we need stories – not to break the silence of the unsayable but to guard and preserve it. It would, however, be a mistake to think that this is all a matter of arguing about language. The world is getting smaller, more crowded and the human future is at stake. Poverty, economics, climate change, ecological degradation, depression, violence, crowd in on us. The implications for our shared life on the planet are enormous. How we imagine the world makes a difference. We live in a world of ever-changing stories, subject to endless interpretation.
We should never underestimate the power of the metaphor, particularly if it fuels resentment and a sense of grievance. Metaphors can kill. Metaphors can justify all kinds of horror and violence. Never say, “It’s only a metaphor.” Stories and metaphors have to be critiqued as well as read-for-the-story. They require a community of readers and critics. They change lives and stir up controversy.
It’s hard for us to accept that there’s a psychic zoo inside all of us – not just one character but a whole menagerie. We need stories in order to understand the cast of characters inside us. Bertie Wooster and Dr. House are two very different characters played by the brilliant actor Hugh Laurie. Bertie (P.G. Wodehouse’s upper class twit) blunders through life with kindly stupidity and with no trace of malice. Dr. House, wounded, cynical and bitterly honest goes around “doing good” in spite of himself. We need them both to say the unsayable. Between them they may get it right. Human beings seek to be grounded in the “real” world and yet not totally bound by it. Each of us, I suspect, has a bit of Bertie and some of House. We need stories – art, poetry, metaphor, religion – to keep our own Bertie and House in touch with each other.
Art, poetry, metaphor, religion are expressions of cultural evolution just as dynamic and vital as biological evolution. We’re in the midst of a big shift away from literalism and scientism – or we’d better be if we are to survive. I see religion as narrative -- open and “unresolved” – albeit tied to historical events (you can’t get out of time and space). Resistance to what is unresolved and unsayable is passionate, deep and largely unconscious. It frightens us. That’s why we are tempted to embrace what is presented as certain and literal. Atheists as well as believers have a great stake in literalism. Both the atheist and the believer think that literalism is the only way a thing can be really true. We ought to know better because we all live by symbols and the power of symbols and the emergence of symbolic behavior goes back a long way – 40,000 to 60,000 years, by some reckoning. Culture (the beginning of symbolic life) included the ability to imagine the future. We’re now in trouble because a future in which human beings not only flourish but continue to exist is sometimes hard to imagine. When we can’t imagine a hopeful future, we become subject to violence and mental illness.
What is astounding is that great science is driven by the unknown and yet many scientists simply accept that the universe “just happened”. The sheer absence of curiosity to ask what or why is astounding: always asking “what” and never asking “why”. One reason, of course, is that there is no final answer as to the “why” of things. Science has no patience for questions which have no answer in principle. It loves the unknown but cannot embrace ultimate unknowability. But when we fail to ask unanswerable questions and struggle to identify and speak the unspeakable (in its destructive and creative forms) life is diminished, made shallow and unsatisfying. We end up with nihilism and re-name it freedom.
This nihilism is the mark of modernity. “To be entirely modern . . . is to believe in nothing. To be truly free is to believe in nothing. Theologian David Bentley Hart writes,
“our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we choose. We trust . . . that there is no substantial criterion by which to judge our choices that stands higher than the unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in some sense an infringement upon our freedom.”[ii]
This kind of freedom requires nihilism. This is the great lie of modernity. There is little understanding that there are two freedoms – the freedom to choose one thing over another, and the higher freedom of knowing that what we have chosen is in accord with our true nature. And finding our true nature is the great spiritual task of all human beings. Much of that quest is fed by the exploration and critiquing of stories. As philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it: “We all want to know how to live. That includes not only knowing how to get what we want, but knowing what to want, and what we should and shouldn’t do.”[iii] It is a challenge to preserve the “unsayable” when our main instrument is words! Literary critic Terry Eagleton’s eternal authority is a very odd one, which isn’t authoritarian. He refers to “The non-God or the anti-God of Scripture, who hates burnt offerings and acts of smug self-righteousness . . . the enemy of idols, fetishes, and graven images of all kinds – gods, churches, ritual sacrifice, the Stars and Stripes, nations, sex, success, ideologies and the like.”[iv] This is a scandal worth exploring and for a believer the biggest scandal of all is the claim that we matter and that God loves us so much that the divine entered into our own mystery by becoming one of us. This is the narrative from the Christian store house of stories. This scandal – absurd as it sounds -- leads me to the ground on which we all stand – a common and shared humanity.
[iii] Thomas Nagel, “What Peter Singer Wants of You,” in the NYRB, March 25, 2010, p. 24. 
