A Protestant atheist praises the King James

    Atheists come in all flavors. My favorite Protestant atheist - living, not yet in Dante’s First Circle - is Christopher Hitchens. The greatest Protestant atheist of all time is Nietzsche; people will be reading him long after Hitch is forgotten. To be sure, the best and brightest atheists are, as a rule, Jewish.  It comes, I suppose, with being part of the Chosen People. I’m thinking of Freud, Marx, and an almost endless parade of lesser luminaries, from Ayn Rand to Steven Pinker. Catholic atheists are also excellent: Kolakowski and Eagleton come to mind. Do Eastern Orthodox make good atheists? Not that I know of.  Stalin of course does not qualify.

    Hitch has written a delightful piece in praise of the King James Version of the Bible for Vanity Fair (HT: Justin Knapp). A few remarks.

    Of course the piece is full of inaccuracies large and small: one should expect no less from Hitch. What H excels in: the smackdown of saints. He finds them all intolerable.  His most wicked takedown this time around concerns Thomas More. I excerpt:

Until the early middle years of the 16th century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It’s a long and stirring story, and its crux is the head-to-head battle between Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale (whose name in early life, I am proud to say, was William Hychyns). Their combat fully merits the term “fundamental.” Infuriating More, Tyndale whenever possible was loyal to the Protestant spirit by correctly translating the word ecclesia to mean “the congregation” as an autonomous body, rather than “the church” as a sacrosanct institution above human law. In English churches, state-selected priests would merely incant the liturgy. Upon hearing the words “Hoc” and “corpus” (in the “For this is my body” passage), newly literate and impatient artisans in the pews would mockingly whisper, “Hocus-pocus,” finding a tough slang term for the religious obfuscation at which they were beginning to chafe. The cold and righteous More, backed by his “Big Brother” the Pope and leading an inner party of spies and inquisitors, watched the Channel ports for smugglers risking everything to import sheets produced by Tyndale, who was forced to do his translating and printing from exile. The rack and the rope were not stinted with dissenters, and eventually Tyndale himself was tracked down, strangled, and publicly burned. (Hilary Mantel’s masterpiece historical novel, Wolf Hall, tells this exciting and gruesome story in such a way as to revise the shining image of “Saint” Thomas More, the “man for all seasons,” almost out of existence. High time, in my view. The martyrdoms he inflicted upon others were more cruel and irrational than the one he sought and found for himself.)

    That is extremely well-written. Still, intellectual rigor ought to make it possible to simultaneously recognize the immense sins and the immense grace that one and the same person, in this case Thomas More, embodies. Martin Luther, the one who inspired Tyndale, put it this way - the anthropological rule under the sign of the cross: simul iustus et peccator (in the shadow of the cross, I am vindicated and I am judged a sinner at one and the same time). In terms of accuracy, no one has ever improved on Luther’s Christological doctrine of man.  So I cannot follow Hitch in his unilateral demolition of More, Mother Theresa, and so on. Hitchens is as Manichean as he thinks his adversaries are.

    Hitchens pines for a living common English Bible. He does not deign to mention the more recent and ongoing Bible wars; if he waded into them, he would surely have scathing remarks for translations as various as the gender-sensitive NRSV, new NIV, and CEB (I digress). Perhaps he believes KJV might still fulfill the honor. He simultaneously praises KJV to high heaven and blasts his church of origin for abandoning it: it is sola scriptura Lutheran Hitch at his best:

The Tyndale/King James translation, even if all its copies were to be burned, would still live on in our language through its transmission by way of Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan and Coleridge, and also by way of beloved popular idioms such as “fatted calf” and “pearls before swine.” It turned out to be rather more than the sum of its ancient predecessors, as well as a repository and edifice of language which towers above its successors. Its abandonment by the Church of England establishment, which hoped to refill its churches and ended up denuding them, is yet another demonstration that religion is man-made, with inky human fingerprints all over its supposedly inspired and unalterable texts. 

    The last sentence is not exactly coherent, but we get Hitch’s point. H takes grim solace in the fact that the text of the Bible has not been unalterable. That gives him grounds, apparently, to take the Jesus of history and faith with a grain of salt, since there are many Jesuses of history and faith (see his piece’s conclusion). 

    No one will deny that Hitch is wrestling with the big questions. He would sympathize with the program of a famous article by Robert W. Jenson, even if he rejected its conclusions: "What If It Were True?" Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 43 (2001) 3-16.    

 

Comments

[Justin (koavf)]

John,

If you're looking for a potential Eastern Orthodox atheist, I don't know of any, but Slavoj Žižek has written several books praising Christianity and comes from (majority Catholic) Slovenia--he's even called himself a "Christian materialist." See: The Fragile Absolute (how only Christians and Marxists can team up to fight against identity politics), The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Christian symbols help us to liberate our minds), and The Monstrosity of Christ (believing in God when belief in God is impossible has motivated Christians to do great things.) He also has a book on Paul that was released in 2010.

--JAK

[JohnFH]

Hi Justin,

I don't know what Žižek'sa heritage or upbringing is. It's an interesting question.

[G. Kyle Essary]

I think Zizek is more in the long line of those who have teetered between Catholicism and Marxism. He remains a materialist Marxist, but a truly Catholic one. There have been many who have crossed that line (in both directions) during the past century.

It seems to me that atheists are most likely to be middle-upper class White westerners simply because (whether they realize it or not), they have grown up in a very Protestant culture that in its disdain for images and idols went too far.

[Daniel Wright]

The most remarkable thing about this is that it means that Peter & Christopher Hitchens have actually found something they agree on.

PS I would include Matthew Parris, the Time columnist, as a protestant atheist. He has actually used the phrase to describe himself, somehwere

[JohnFH]

Hi Kyle,

That sounds right w.r.t. Zizek.

Catholic atheists are a recognizable breed.

The atheists who become Catholics tend to be super-smart and sincerely repentant such that they are unlikely to move in the direction of Protestantism (which, in its iconclasm, sometimes approaches the metaphysical and experiential aridness associated with atheism).

Re: (new) atheists are well-off whites

That reminds me of something Berlinerblau (an atheist himself, of the serious, Chosen variety) said recently:

Unbelievable Amounts of White Dudes . . . the New Atheist Movement has pulled off the impressive feat of being less diverse than the Tea Party.

Here's the link in case you missed it:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/new-atheismthe-tea-party-reflections-on-professors-ruse-and-barash/33501

[JohnFH]

Hi Daniel,

I think I enjoy reading Matthew Parris for that very reason, now that you mention it.

[Leon]

Christopher Hitchens has Jewish ancestry too.