The Importance of Sincere Atheism

Atheism is to Christianity what Baldness is to hairdressing — a poor substitute, you may feel, but an important “absolute zero” calibration for the thermometer. Ben Myers is an Australian theologian from Sydney, who has researched the writings of Samuel Becket. As the Global Atheist Convention opens in Melbourne he offers some fascinating theological reflection.

Ben points out that Karl Barth used to begin his courses with the atheism of Feuerbach, because he believed that until you had journeyed beyond the “God” constructed by Bourgeois conformists in their blindness and blandness, with their easy certainties, you could not begin to journey towards the Real Thing. Ben goes on to suggest:

The real test of the Convention will be its willingness to resist easy certainties, its capacity to accommodate vigorous difference and debate (I nearly said to accommodate doubt). I’ve attended many theology conferences, and most of the time you’d be hard pressed to find two people in the room who actually agree with each other. Unquestioning agreement and lack of argumentativeness are always sure signs that a tradition has stagnated. The purpose of a conference or convention is not to celebrate our sameness, but to join together in a shared project of intellectual inquisitiveness and exploration. The Atheist Convention will be a worthwhile event if it creates a space for this kind of inquisitiveness, if divergent views are seen not as departures from the party line but as opportunities for argument and discussion, if the mood is one of questioning and exploration rather than certainty and collective self-affirmation.

Above all, the Convention will be a success if it cultivates serious reflection and resists the cheap allure of slogans and marketing gimmickry. I wonder what Samuel Beckett would have thought of an atheism so easy and so confident that it can fit on the front of a T-shirt or the side of a bus. Atheism as a lifestyle choice – an atheism you can believe in. Frankly, I suspect Beckett would sooner have believed in God.

Reflecting on my own teenage struggles in coming to faith, it took me a while to learn it was actually possible to doubt doubt itself — to achieve radical free thought, if you like. That’s the zone in which God’s reality first began reallly to dawn on me, rather than a Charismatic meeting or similar. I’m not saying there's any partcular virtue in that. It’s just the way the penny dropped for me. Perhaps, as Barth suggested, faith needs the astringent of taking atheism seriously (as it has since the Book of Job), to prevent itself from mushing down into mental idolatry. If so, genuine dialogue between sincere atheists and Christians could genuinely have as much to offer Christians as atheists.

Six Days in Lent

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This year our diocese is encouraging everyone to rediscover ways to sustain the sacred centre. This could induce Narcissism and Tea Light Overdrive, but it’s an important task. Humanly speaking, the whole life of the Church is powered by passion, prayer and spiritual conviction. If faith becomes thin and stringy, we will soon lose the plot, and with it, the means to be a transformative community.

It’s an encouraging phrase, but how do we sustain the sacred centre? My archdeaconry close colleagues (Andrew, Caroline, Karen, Rosie and Roy) and I tried to think this through last autumn. There’s a lot of hype about spirituality, and we were trying to be realistic.

We needed to find something we could recommend, in the light of various complications:

1. Everyone is sustained in different ways by different things, being at different stages on their journey. Even if we could work out the perfect Universal Spiritual Centering Wheeze (shades of Monty Python’s funniest joke in the world) some would be more ready to take it on than others
   
   
2. Our colleagues are busy people. If we simply download one extra thing we think might help onto them we could actually be making the problem worse — This morning you had 45 things to do. Now you’ve got 46. This is hardly a spiritually energising prospect.
   
   
3. If bishop and archdeacon model extra overload people may think we think spiritual development is a job, or an optional extra job, or something that can be accomplished by doing even more of the same — A wise and experienced priest in another diocese told me his turning point was when he had realised that the less he did, the more of value seemed to happen. That’s not an absolute principle, but 99% of vicars err on the side of overwork not underwork.
   

So we came up with the notion of Six Days in Lent. This is official permission to spend one day a week in Lent out of your trench, doing something you believe will nourish your soul. Even if you’re wrong, it was worth the risk. You can block the day out as assiduously as you would a funeral or Church meeting, and write it into your schedule. What kinds of things? Karen, Andrew, Caroline and I brainstormed 40 starters to get the creative thoughts going:

In this spirit, this first week of Lent, I headed for somewhere I’d never been, Pelagos in Latimer. This is a new and innovative Spirituality development centre in the best countryside on the Underground, near the River Chess. Various events go on there, and it’s available to people and groups for all sorts of different purposes, including, last Saturday, a day exploring Jesus’ wilderness experience with 30 others. It struck me how much of our feeling and thinking is shaped by a crush of immediate externals. In a desert the externals are much more basic. I was interested by parallel between what happened to Jesus in the desert and Richard Rohr’s concept of how men to grow up, or don’t, which I’ve described elsewhere. The wilderness is a crucible in which we engage with greed, ego, and possessiveness, set apart from the toys and concerns that feed those old friends.

Next up? I’m taking a session to read The Horse and His Boy — the only Chronicles of Narnia children’s book I’ve never read. Then van Gogh or Chris Ofili, I wot... Watch this space.

What kind of Unity? and of Church?

Rowan Williams’ lecture in Rome marks an interesting reframing of ecumenical futures. There is, of course, the conventional RC model. The Church achieves the Unity for which Jesus prayed when every Christian in the world submits to it as a Divinely sanctioned Imperium. Or try the Protestant version. Structural and organisational convergence will somehow produce a complex multiplanar hybrid. Everyone trades in their old but coherent structural and accountability models to the shining new one. Unity remains a future goal, and we all have to make it happen.

Those two notions have their finer points. The retro-RC one has the virtue of coherence and vertical accountabioity lines, allbeit a coherence that many of its own followers ignore. It does actually exist. The Liberal Protestant one respects the value of every strand and models mutuality, consent and fellowship but, here comes the twist, it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, like its Roman colleague, it has a tendency to homogenise everything into what it wants them to be, rather than taking the trouble to understand the particularities which make up any Church. Surely these amount to more than simply a ghastly mistake on God’s part.

What the last thirty years has revealed, however, is that a simple binary unity based on Imperium or Liberal democracy raise questions as well as answering them. The great ecclesiologists of Vatican II have established a great deal of common ground theologically, but considerable divergence organisationally and politically. At which point, enter Cardinal Kasper with a model I think is fundamental to what we are trying to do in England today. In a vitally important address delivered in St Albans in 2002, Cardinal Kasper suggested we accept the old Structural/bureaucratic ecumenical quest had gone as far as it could in its own terms, and it was time for fresh thinking. He suggested what he called Receptive Ecumenism. This means that everyone lays gently on one side the dream of Homogenised unity, and concentrates on seeing how they can be a gift to the whole company of Christ’s faithful people. Equally tellingly, we try to develop attitudes and practice in receiving the others as gift not threat. Do that for a bit, and see where it gets us. So out go big merger schemes based on fudge, and quests for imperial hegemony. In come processes of Appreciative Inquiry and clarity.

How is Rowan sharpening up these questions? He’s asking what the great degree of theological convergence revealed by the work of the past thirty years amounts to. He’s diagnosing two principles inherent in the life of the baptized — a Conciliar horizontal plane, and an ordained vertical line of accountability. He’s asking how these integrate in the actual lives Churches and Christians live, as well as the notional sructures within which they find themselves. Catholic is both a macro-concept, but also an inherent dimension of local, micro Christian life. Playing one off against the other is foolish, wherever you’re coming from.

Catholic Unity isn’t something humans create by obiterating others. God created it on Good Friday, and it’s inherent in the Unity of Christ. Is Christ divided? When Jesus prayed for Unity, did God say “no?” or did God decide that the effectiveness of the whole enterprise depends on ecclesiastical politics come right? Or did he say yes, create a spiritual unity by the death and resurrection of Jesus, clothe Jesus’ followers in it by baptism, and ask them to make sense of Unity, not as a goal on the distant horizon to be achieved by diplomacy or conquest, but a resource to be realised in an emergent way by faithfulness in a multiplanar reality we call “communion.” The submission required is necessary but mutual, not one-way. The obedience is primarily to God in Scripture, mediated through the whole life of all the baptised...

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All I have been attempting to say here is that the ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full – and then to ask about the character of the unfinished business between us. For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain. And if it isn’t, can we all allow ourselves to be challenged to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that has brought us thus far?