Tuesday, October 06, 2009

More God talk, sorry about that

'The Case for God,' by Karen Armstrong - Review - NYTimes.com

Well well. I had my own extended comments on Karen Armstrong's latest book back in July, in which I doubted her characterisation of early Christianity.

I think its fair to say that this review in the New York Times, while not entirely unsympathetic to Armstrong, pretty much supports my take. First, remember that her key argument (as summarised in the review) was that the Christian Church fathers:
...understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred” and emphasizes what we can’t know about the divine.
The reviewer notes that this claim needs to be highly qualified:
Armstrong concedes that the religious story she’s telling highlights only a particular trend within monotheistic faith. The casual reader, however, would be forgiven for thinking that the leading lights of premodern Christianity were essentially liberal Episcopalians avant la lettre.

In reality, these Christian sages were fiercely dogmatic by any modern standard. They were not fundamentalists, reading every line of Scripture literally, and they were, as Armstrong says, “inventive, fearless and confident in their interpretation of faith.” But their inventiveness was grounded in shared doctrines and constrained by shared assumptions. Their theology was reticent in its claims about the ultimate nature of God but very specific about how God had revealed himself on earth. It’s true that Augustine, for instance, did not interpret the early books of Genesis literally. But he certainly endorsed a literal reading of Jesus’ resurrection — and he wouldn’t have been much of a Christian theologian if he hadn’t.

Which is to say that it’s considerably more difficult than Armstrong allows to separate thought from action, teaching from conduct, and dogma from practice in religious history. The dogmas tend to sustain the practices, and vice versa. It’s possible to gain some sort of “knack” for a religion without believing that all its dogmas are literally true: a spiritually inclined person can no doubt draw nourishment from the Roman Catholic Mass without believing that the Eucharist literally becomes the body and blood of Christ. But without the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Mass would not exist to provide that nourishment. Not every churchgoer will share Flannery O’Connor’s opinion that if the Eucharist is “a symbol, to hell with it.” But the Catholic faith has endured for 2,000 years because of Flannery O’Connors, not Karen Armstrongs.
I quite agree.

7 comments:

Geoff said...

I did a reply that disappeared into the ether and I haven't time to redo it in full.

I recall making an inappropriately dogmatic statement that the reviewer was completely wrong.

He privileges the positive way to God in a way that only reveals his prejudice and lack of religious imagination. It is the mystics that sustain the Church and renew it over the protestations of the dogmatists. The premodern thinkers he mentions were mainly Greeks (not liberal episcopalians!) and certainly removed from the reviewers way of thought.

He also hasn't the knack to realise that a myth resonates is true.

Thanks for the link, Steven.

Geoff said...

sorry
"a myth that resonates is true"

Steve said...

Don't you hate it when a long comment disappears before it can be posted. Did you mean you did a long comment on this post, or the earlier one?

I'm not sure now which reviewer you are complaining about. The NYT one I quote here I assume?

I will have more to say later, I expect.

Geoff said...

Yes, I meant the reviewer in the NYT. I hate losing the comment but it is always my fault as I am too old to reliably remember passwords etc.

BTW Stop Making Sense is perfectly adequate on ordinary DVD. I can't see the sense of Bluray for things like that.

Paul Pavao said...

The early church fathers could be the way they were because the foundation of the faith was not an interpretation of the New Testament, which didn't exist in the first couple centuries--at least not as a collected work--but the rule of faith.

There was a set "faith" handed down to the saints that Jude, probably an early Christian tract, said to earnestly contend for. They did earnestly contend for that faith, whatever important doctrines were handed down by the apostles, and not for literal or liberal interpretations of Scripture.

It would do us well to learn the rule of faith. There's various versions of it throughout the early Church fathers, and the most famous one is the Nicene or Apostles Creed.

Steve said...

"A myth that resonates is true": that's sort of the Tolkien line, isn't it? I can't remember exactly how he put it, except that I thought most people thought it peculiar.

And it all depends on what you mean by "true", I guess.

Steve said...

By the way, there is a long thread on the original review over at Commonweal. All rather deep, the people who read that blog:

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=4753