NOTE: This is the third post in Stephen Bullivant's series on atheists and the Catholic Church, particularly what the Second Vatican Council taught about atheism. Be sure to read Part 1 and Part 2. Also, his new book on this topic, Faith and Unbelief (Paulist Press), debuts this week. Check it out!
 

 
In the last episode of my irregular 'Vatican II on atheism' series, we saw how a number of determined bishops - not least the Bishop of Rome - ensured that the Council took unbelief seriously. We now turn to the main fruit of this attention: articles 19 to 21 of Gaudium et Spes.

Let me be quite plain. If you really want to know what the Catholic Church has to say about atheism, then your first port of call should be Gaudium et Spes (GS) 19-21. Not Strange Notions. Not Brandon Vogt, Trent Horn, or Kevin Aldrich. Not even some off-the-cuff remarks of Pope Francis. Don't get me wrong: these would all be excellent second ports of call. But undoubtedly the place to start is GS 19-21 (as all the kids are calling it) itself. Though less than 1,500 words long, it is a detailed and nuanced statement, and is both theologically and historically significant. And more to the point, it carries the full magisterial weight of a general Council behind it. And if that doesn't entice you into wanting to read it, then what could?

Go on...here it is (just scroll down a bit). This is the Vatican’s own English translation, though there are several other—and arguably better—versions out there. However, since it’s this one that’s freely available online, it’s this one I’ll be using for my commentary. It’s worth remembering, though, that the only authoritative version is the Latin original—and so every so often we’ll be dipping into that too. As you'll know if you've already read it, GS 19-21 covers a lot of ground in a small amount of space. So in this post, we're only going to look at article 19. Articles 20 and 21 can wait till next time.

Before we begin, it's worth noting something about the document as a whole. Following the normal Church convention, Gaudium et Spes is just the text's nickname, taken from its opening words, which are Latin for 'joy and hope'. (As in: "The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ...") The text's proper title is normally given as the somewhat less zingy "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World," but this is slightly misleading. Strictly speaking, the title refers to "The Church in the World of This Time (huius temporis)'. It is worth bearing in mind that the Council Fathers are commenting directly on the world of the mid-1960s—they are not necessarily in the business, in this text, of making 'for-the-ages' pronouncements. Which is not to say there isn't a huge amount of timeless, enduring value in the document, both at the level of general principles, and right down in the details. But still, since the text is so up front about the fact it is speaking to a particular historical context, we should bear this in mind.

What Does Article 19 Say?

 
Here's how the nineteenth article begins:

"The root reason for human dignity lies in man's call to communion with God. From the very circumstance of his origin man is already invited to converse with God. For man would not exist were he not created by God’s love and constantly preserved by it; and he cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges [God's] love and devotes himself to his Creator."

These opening sentences situate the Council's comments on atheism in a very precise, theological framework. All human beings are, whether they know it or like it, in a relationship with their Creator. That is what humans are for. They are not, in Bertrand Russell's phrase, "a cosmic accident" (though they might, depending on one's views about divine Providence and contingency, be a kind of "cosmic accidentally-on-purpose"). Later on, in article 21, the text will sum up this theme with the famous quotation from St. Augustine's Confessions: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee."

So the Council begins its statement about atheists with a series of claims that an atheist, ipso facto, cannot possibly accept. To my mind, that's a fairly bold opening gambit. No softly, softly approach—"ease 'em in, then hit 'em with the God stuff"—here. Instead, the Church begins by laying its cards face up on the table: this is where we're coming from, this is what Christians believe about all people (not just atheists), and everything else we have to say about the subject has to be understood in this light. (Incidentally, this is the same approach that John Paul II takes to sexual ethics in his Theology of Body—what the Church has to say about sex cannot be divorced from who it believes humans are in the first place.) Furthermore, by situating its discussion of atheism within the context of "Christian anthropology" (as this branch of theology—considering who humans are, and what they are called to be—is known), the Council emphasizes that, whatever else the Church might have to say about atheists, it is talking about people who, first and foremost, have been made in "the image of God" (Genesis 1:27), and whom God invites to spend eternity with him. That's quite a compliment. Not, admittedly, one that those to whom it is addressed can readily accept, but a compliment nonetheless.

The article continues:

"Still, many of our contemporaries have never recognized this intimate and vital link with God, or have explicitly rejected it. Thus atheism must be accounted among the most serious problems of this age, and is deserving of closer examination."

Given the grand vision sketched above, the growth and prevalence of unbelief is obviously problematic for the Catholic Church. Technically though, the official Latin text (unlike this, and many other English translations) doesn't actually call atheism a "most serious problem." A more faithful translation of the Latin would be the less antagonistic-sounding: "atheism may be numbered among the most important issues of this time (atheismus inter gravissimas huius temporis res adnumerandus)." Either way, the Council is clear that it deserves a more thorough investigation.

Continuing on:

"The word atheism is applied to phenomena which are quite distinct from one another. For while God is expressly denied by some, others believe that man can assert absolutely nothing about Him. Still others use such a method to scrutinize the question of God as to make it seem devoid of meaning. Many, unduly transgressing the limits of the positive sciences, contend that everything can be explained by this kind of scientific reasoning alone, or by contrast, they altogether disallow that there is any absolute truth. Some laud man so extravagantly that their faith in God lapses into a kind of anemia, though they seem more inclined to affirm man than to deny God.
 
Again some form for themselves such a fallacious idea of God that when they repudiate this figment they are by no means rejecting the God of the Gospel. Some never get to the point of raising questions about God, since they seem to experience no religious stirrings nor do they see why they should trouble themselves about religion. Moreover, atheism results not rarely from a violent protest against the evil in this world, or from the absolute character with which certain human values are unduly invested, and which thereby already accords them the stature of God. Modern civilization itself often complicates the approach to God not for any essential reason but because it is so heavily engrossed in earthly affairs."

True to its word, there follows a long paragraph delineating the many different forms that contemporary unbelief can take. We needn't get bogged down in the details of this. Note, though, that GS favours a broad definition of atheism: including varieties of definite disbelief ("God is expressly denied by some"), plus forms of agnosticism, logical positivism, promethean humanism, indifference, and several more besides. Roughly speaking, in this GS foreshadows several recent scholarly works such as The Cambridge Companion to Atheism and The Oxford Handbook of Atheism which also argue for an inclusive definition. Note too, in the final sentence, a recognition of socio-cultural factors on the prevalence and plausibility of unbelief (i.e., it's not just about philosophical arguments). The first half of that sentence, at least, basically sums up classic secularization theory: "Modern civilization itself often complicates the approach to God."

Believers Responsible for Atheism?

 
Gaudium et Spes continues:

"Undeniably, those who willfully shut out God from their hearts and try to dodge religious questions are not following the dictates of their consciences, and hence are not free of blame; yet believers themselves frequently bear some responsibility for this situation. For, taken as a whole, atheism is not a spontaneous development but stems from a variety of causes, including a critical reaction against religious beliefs, and in some places against the Christian religion in particular. Hence believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral, or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion."

We come now to perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Catholic teaching on atheism. The Church here recognizes that, at least to some extent, unbelief arises "through [our] fault, through [our] fault, through [our] most grievous fault." As we saw in part two of this series, this was an idea that several of the Council fathers insisted upon. Three decades earlier, Henri de Lubac—one of the theological experts entrusted with drafting GS 19-21—had made a similar point in his hugely influential Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. (Incidentally, there’s a whole chapter on this theme in my own, somewhat less influential Faith and Unbelief.)

GS is here echoing a point made by many nonbelievers (and former believers), one confirmed in sociological investigations of deconversion (see, e.g., Phil Zuckerman’s excellent Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion): Christians are not always God’s best advert. And this arises from their being both bad teachers and bad witnesses. This is a point to which the Council, and we, shall return in GS 21.

Notice what the text is not saying. It is not claiming that "bad Christians" are the only cause of, or justification for, unbelief. That would undercut everything else GS 19 has to say about the various types of atheism, and the explicit claim above that it "stems from a variety of causes." (It would also be extremely arrogant and exhibit a clear failure to take atheism seriously as a social, cultural, and intellectual phenomenon.) Significantly, it is also not implying any blanket "absolution" of unbelievers: "Undeniably, those who willfully shut out God from their hearts and try to dodge religious questions are...not free of blame (culpae expertes non sunt)." (Though even here, the very same sentence confesses that "believers themselves frequently bear some responsibility for this situation.") Faith and unbelief, GS 19 reminds us, remain matters of (eternal) life and death. This will be important for us to remember in later installments, when we look at the Council’s other key statement on atheism, especially the affirmation that "those who have not arrived at an express recognition of God" are nevertheless "able to be saved" in Lumen Gentium 14-16.

One Impressed Atheist

 
Finally, we'll keep with our tradition of ending these episodes with a quotation from an actual atheist. Today's words come from Jacques Berlinerblau’s 2012 book How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom:

"Whereas a student of church history might expect [GS 19-21] to anathematize the atheist, no such condemnations are forthcoming. Rather, what follows is a sober, fair and introspective analysis of the significance of nonbelief for Catholic thought...Not exactly a teary embrace of nonbelief. Nonetheless, the willingness to look at the problem, calmly and without rancor, is impressive." (pp. 100-1)

 
 
(Image credit: Spectator)

Welcome to the second post in my little series 'Vatican II on atheism'. As noted last time, according to at least one reputable commentator, the Council's primary statement on the subject "may be counted among [its] most important pronouncements". In future posts, we'll be looking at Gaudium et Spes 19-21, as well as the separate statement on salvation in Lumen Gentium 14-16, in some details. So - let's face it—we've all got plenty of exegetical fun to look forward to. This post, though, will be rather different. Its purpose is to set the scene, to explain the contexts out of which GS 19-21 and LG 14-16 grew. Think of it as being akin to a classic "How the Gang Got Together" episode.

Fact is, atheism could easily not have featured in the conciliar literature at all. The Council opened in October 1962. By the start of the Third Session, two years later, the most any of the draft documents had to say on the subject was a passing mention of "errors which spring from materialism, especially from dialectical materialism or communism" in the so-called 'Schema XIII'. Just 15 months before the close of the Council, then, one of "the most serious matters of our time"—as Schema XIII (i.e., the ultimate Gaudium et Spes) would come to describe it—wasn't looking quite so serious after all.

A combination of two things changed that: the bishops, and the Pope (which, incidentally, is exactly the right combination you want making things happen at an Ecumenical Council).

Among many other criticisms of the Schema XIII draft as a whole, its ignoring of atheism was time and again singled out in the bishops' plenary discussions. On the very first day of debate, the Chilean Cardinal Silva Henríquez spoke of "the need for dialogue with contemporary humanism", urging that "The Church must try to comprehend atheism, to examine the truths which nourish this error, and to be able to correspond its life and doctrine to these aspirations." The next day, the Belgian Cardinal Suenens had this to say:

"Atheism is certainly a terrible error...it would be too easy simply to condemn it. It is necessary to examine why so many men profess themselves to be atheists, and whom precisely is this 'God' they so sharply attack. Thus dialogue should be begun with them so that they may seek and recognize the true image of God who is perhaps concealed under the caricatures they reject. On our part, meanwhile, we should examine our way of speaking of God and living the faith, lest the sun of the living God is darkened for them." [These are my translations from the official Acta; for full translations of the speeches, see Peter Hebblethwaite, The Council Fathers and Atheism: The Interventions at the Fourth Session of Vatican Council II (New York: Paulist Press, 1967)]

Taking these comments (and many more on other topics) on board, the Council Fathers duly sent Schema XIII away to be rewritten. A new version—the so-called 'Ariccia text' for Vatican II buffs—was circulated the following summer, and met with much greater, general approval in the September 1965 debates. But yet again, the Fathers proved sticklers when it came to the statement on atheism; though much improved, it still wasn't up to scratch.

In the most powerful of the critiques, the Melkite Cardinal Maximos Saigh warned that atheists "are often scandalized by the sight of a mediocre and egoistical Christendom absorbed by money and false riches", adding: "is it not the egotism of certain Christians which has caused, and causes to a great extent, the atheism of the masses?" In the end, the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Franz König, suggested that—with the close of the Council only months away—a whole new statement on atheism should be written from scratch. Helpfully, he offered the services of the newly-created Secretariat for Non-believers for this eleventh-hour mission. Which brings us nicely to Pope Paul VI...

Paul was the second of Vatican II's popes, having been elected following the death of John XXIII in June 1963. The following August, he published his first encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, in order to show how and why the Church and the world, as he rather sweetly puts it, "should meet together, and get to know and love one another" (art. 3). 'Dialogue' is the great watchword here, and much attention is given to the value of improving relationships with both non-Catholic Christian communities, and the other world religions. Crucially, atheists are not ignored either.

Paul's opening gambit might not, I readily admit, exactly warm the cockles of the hearts of my atheist friends here at Strange Notions. However, my aim here is not to 'cherry pick' the enticing, welcoming bits of the Church's engagement with unbelief (like you wouldn't see straight through that, right?). So here is what he actually says:

"Many [today] subscribe to atheism in one of its many different forms. They parade their godlessness, asserting its claims in education and politics, in the foolish and fatal belief that they are emancipating mankind from false and outworn notions about life and the world and substituting a view that is scientific and up to date. This is the most serious problem of our time. [...] Any social system based on these principles is doomed to utter destruction. Atheism, therefore, is not a liberating force, but a catastrophic one, for it seeks to quench the light of the living God." (Ecclesiam Suam, 99, 100)

There are a good few paragraphs more in this vein, for those wanting to read them. It becomes clear that the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and elsewhere—and the sufferings of Christians at their hands—are a large part of what Paul has in mind here. But I won't pretend that he explicitly confines his remarks to them alone.

In a certain sense, the above remarks make what Paul goes on to say about atheists all the more significant.

"We see these men serving a demanding and often a noble cause, fired with enthusiasm and idealism, dreaming of justice and progress [...] They are sometimes men of great breadth of mind, impatient with the mediocrity and self-seeking which infects so much of modern society. They are quick to make use of sentiments and expressions found in our gospel, referring the brotherhood of man, mutual aid, and human compassion. Shall we not one day be able to lead them back to the Christian sources of these moral values?" (Ecclesiam Suam, 104)

In my own atheist days, I suppose that I would have found something patronising and presumptuous in those words, not least on the subject of meta-ethics (and perhaps a part of me still does). I like to think, though, that I would have recognized at least as much sincerity and goodwill on the Pope's behalf (however much I thought him misguided on major points), as he is willing to grant to those unbelievers dreaming of 'justice and progress' (however much he thinks them misguided on major points). What do you think?

Paul ends his comments on atheism by expressing hope for "the eventual possibility of a dialogue between these men and the Church, and a more fruitful one than is possible at present" (art. 105). This hope was evidently a sincere one. Eight months later, in April 1965, the Vatican newspaper quietly announced Paul's creation of a Secretariat for Non-Believers. As its new secretary explained to Vatican Ratio, its purpose was not only to study atheism, but also "to organize groups of priests and lay people who will be well prepared to enter into a dialogue with atheists, should the occasion arise" (quoted in my The Salvation of Atheists, p. 70). As its president, Cardinal König, used playfully to point out, the Secretariat was named for non-believers, and not against them.

As mentioned earlier, it was the Secretariat's consultors who ended up drafting Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes 19-21. It's this we'll being looking at next time around. I made a point in my last post, though, of ending with a quotation from an actual atheist. While I doubt I'll manage to maintain that tradition for the whole series, here's another one.

It comes from a letter I dug up in the Secretariat's archives, now housed at the Pontifical Council for Culture, about five years ago. It was written by Tolbert H. McCarroll, Executive Director of the American Humanist Association, to Cardinal König, and is dated just five days after the Secretariat was formally announced. McCarroll welcomes this fact, explains a bit about the AHA (enclosing some literature), and cordially invites members of the Secretariat to meet with humanist representatives in the Netherlands that summer. He ends with sentence:

"This letter would not be closed without reference to the late Pope John XXIII. We may differ in our opinion as to the source of his humane concern, but we can join together in our admiration of this great model of humanity."

Pope Paul's desire for a "more fruitful dialogue" seemed like it might come true rather sooner than he had hoped.
 
 
(Image credit: Crisis Magazine)

"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun" (Eccl 1:9). This famous observation of the Book of Ecclesiastes applies, to a certain extent, to the recent upsurge of Catholic interest in and—more importantly, serious engagement with—atheism. Popes announcing that "there should be a dialogue with those to whom...God is unknown", and that atheists are capable of "doing good" and "are able to be saved"? The Vatican sponsoring major dialogue events between Christians and unbelievers? High-profile Catholic and atheist writers and intellectuals coming together to explore (mutually!) "strange notions"? It all leads us to ask the same question as the author of Ecclesiastes: "Is there a thing of which it is said, 'See, this is new'? It has already been in the ages before us" (Eccl 1:10).

I am referring, of course, to the period in and around the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). For those who don't know, "Vatican II" is the twenty-first, and most recent, ecumenical Council recognized by the Catholic Church, assembling all the bishops of the "inhabited world" (the oikoumene or ecumene, hence "ecumenical"). The first such Council was held in Nicaea, modern-day Turkey, in 325, and is where the Nicene Creed originated. On average, then, ecumenical Councils come along just under once a century; and in modern times, they come along even less frequently (there have been just three—Trent, Vatican I, and Vatican II—in the last 500 years). Which is to say, ecumenical Councils are big deals in the life of the Church. What they actually have to say about things (as opposed to what people assume they have to say) are—or should be—taken very seriously indeed by Catholics. And that is especially true, of course, for those presuming to comment on "what the Church teaches about X."

As it happens, Vatican II had quite a bit to say about atheism and atheists, most of it contained in two documents: Lumen Gentium, articles 14-16; and Gaudium et Spes, articles 19-21. The latter, which contains the Council's dedicated statement on atheism, is particularly important. Almost fifty years later, it arguably remains the longest and most detailed statement of the Magisterium (i.e., the teaching authority of the Church) on what it regards to be "among the most serious matters of our time" (art. 19). According to the future Pope Benedict XVI, Gaudium et Spes 19-21 "may be counted among the most important pronouncements of Vatican II" (Joseph Ratzinger, in Vorgrimler [ed.], Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. V, 1969, p. 145).

This is the first post in what I intend to be a short(ish) series introducing and commenting on various aspects of the Council's engagement with atheism. Lumen Gentium 16 and Gaudium et Spes 19-21 will obviously get posts (perhaps several) to themselves. But they cannot, I think, be properly understood in a vacuum. Accordingly, my next post will instead focus on Pope Paul VI's debut encyclical on dialogue Ecclesiam Suam, promulgated in 1964 (and thus, in an important sense, "in the Council, but not of it"), and his creation of a "Secretariat for Non-believers" that same year. Both, as we will see, were very influential indeed on the Council's own pronouncements on atheism, as they also were on much of the Church's ongoing engagements with both atheism and, significantly, atheists in the decade or so after Vatican II (this too will be discussed as part of the series).

Inevitably, much of this series will consist of a Catholic talking about other Catholics talking about atheists, humanists, Marxists, and so on. But, of course, and I really hope that this has come across in some of my other posts, one of the main reasons I'm doing this, and the reason why I'm so pleased to be doing it at Strange Notions, is because I'm genuinely interested in what "the ones being talked about" actually think about what's being said. Obviously, I don't expect atheists to agree with everything, or necessarily very much, of what Vatican II has to say about them—since the Church is speaking out of worldview that atheists, ipso facto, don't share. But if atheists don't recognize at least something of themselves in what Christians have to say about them, then that probably suggests that Christians are missing the mark entirely—tilting at unbelieving windmills, so to speak. All which is, of course, a long way of saying: I look forward to our combox discussions.

On that note, it is probably a good idea to give the final words of this introduction over to a bona-fide atheist. The focus of this series is on Vatican II, and as such, I'll be saying almost nothing (except in passing) about the quite considerable Christian-atheist engagement in the decades leading up to it. Suffice it to say that much of the groundwork for the Church's constructive engagement with atheism (and vice versa!) in the 1960s onward was lain in the thirties, forties, and fifties, especially in countries like France and Italy. My favorite example of this—I quote it in my new book Faith and Unbelief: A Theology of Atheism—comes from 1948. The atheist philosopher Albert Camus was invited by a group of Parisian Dominicans to come to their Priory and give his honest views on Christianity. While the entire lecture is very much worth reading, I'd like to end by quoting just one passage, since I think it expresses something important about the kind of authentic dialogue this website exists to promote:
 

"I shall not try to change anything that I think or anything that you think (insofar as I can judge of it) in order to reach a reconciliation that would be agreeable to all. On the contrary, what I feel like telling you today is that the world needs real dialogue, that falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as silence, and that the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain what they are and speak their minds."
("The Unbeliever and Christians", in Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays, [1948] 1964, p. 48)

 
 
(Image credit: Most Holy Family Monastery)

In the Bible, Psalms 14 and 53 both open with the statement: “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’” Whatever this may tell us about unbelief in ancient Hebrew society, today it is not only, or predominantly, fools who are saying this. And they do not restrict their utterances to their hearts alone.

Especially in the United States and Europe—the historic heart of “Christendom”—there are large (and growing) numbers of intelligent, educated, reasonable people who reject Christianity and the God it proclaims. Many of these find Christian belief to be literally incredible—not just false, but ridiculously and grotesquely so. Some of these are high-profile public figures: scientists, philosophers, journalists, novelists, politicians, bloggers, and stand-up comedians. But most of them are just normal folks. They are colleagues, friends, relatives, and even, at least sometimes, a little bit of ourselves. Crucially, we ought not to forget that, particularly in the United States, these non-fools have likely been (and will ever remain) sealed by baptism; the Catholics among them will have been catechized, confirmed, and given first Communion as “true witnesses of Christ,” as the “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church” describes them (LG, 11).

These hard facts, especially when combined with rising levels of those “non-affiliated” with religion (most of whom are not, or at least not yet, actual atheists), present the Church with even harder questions. For the most part, despite the Second Vatican Council’s prescient observation in the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”—“atheism may be numbered among the most serious matters of our time and merits more careful attention”—they are questions we have scarcely begun to formulate, let alone answer. Doing so is one of the most urgent tasks that Catholics face today.

Of course, there are myriad reasons (philosophical, psychological, social, cultural, moral) why a person might become skeptical toward the truth-claims of Christianity. Here I'll focus on just one. Somewhat perversely, this is a fundamental feature of the Christian message, yet one that atheists often grasp more intuitively than we do. Basically, the non-fools have realized something essential that we Catholics have been trying to forget.
 

Monstrous Claims

 
Let’s face it: The God of Christianity is an extraordinarily odd kind of being (if one can call God a kind of “being” at all). And the followers of this God subscribe to—or say they do—a list of seemingly ludicrous claims.

It is one thing to affirm a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, who created and sustains “all things visible and invisible.” That is in itself a fairly striking and radical claim—in its time, one that was revolutionary in human history and that the infant Christianity imbibed at the breast of Judaism. Yet it is quite another thing to claim that this God—or worse, one of three persons of this one God—took flesh, resulting in someone both fully God and fully human.

Consider, for example, Christianity’s most instantly recognizable (and thereby most easily ignorable) symbols: the baby Jesus and the crucifix. The first symbol proclaims that this God-man spent a significant amount of time doing things like suffering from colic and cradle cap, screaming in the night for no discernible reason, and weeing incontinently over his sleep-deprived (human) parents. Tears, tantrums and teething are thus the works of the one true God, just as surely as are “the heaven and the earth, the sea, and everything in them” (Acts 4:24).

The second symbol affirms that the God-man was tortured and murdered, subjected not even to some grandiosely superlative mode of suffering and death, as might befit a king, but to the tawdrily mundane form of execution to which the Roman Empire treated countless slaves, pirates and enemies of the state (a fact that in itself raises an interesting question about the kind of God we are dealing with).

It is perhaps fair to say that most believers do not quite realize the outrageous character of these most basic and taken-for-granted hallmarks of Christianity. (Is there not something at least a little strange about hanging around one’s neck a miniature corpse nailed to a tiny cross?) Irrespective of whether they are true or not, these are surely among the wildest and most monstrous claims ever proposed in human history. And if they are true, then they are, or ought to be, the most profound and world-inverting facts about life and the universe. Yet somehow, in the course of nearly 2,000 years, these claims have become so familiar, so tamed and domesticated, as to seem hardly worthy of comment, let alone wonder or puzzlement, among the great majority of those who profess them.
 

Foolishness to the Gentiles

 
Such was not, however, the case for those to whom the good news of Jesus Christ was first proposed. As Paul famously put it: “We proclaim Christ and him crucified, a stumbling-block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles” (1 Cor 1:23). For the Jews, of course, the claim that the Messiah had come but had been crucified was blasphemously scandalous (skandalon being the Greek word for “stumbling-block”). And they were, it should be said, impeccably non-foolish in thinking so: No one was expecting a crucified-and-raised Messiah (hence, for example, Peter’s “satanic” rebuke to Jesus in Matthew 16:22 and the disappointment of those trudging along the road to Emmaus concerning him whom they “had hoped...would be the one to redeem Israel” in Luke 24).

For the gentiles, meanwhile—the non-Jews—the entire proclamation was manifest folly. The very idea that the king of the Jews—indeed, of the whole world—would hail not merely from a backwater of the Empire (Judea), but from a backwater of that backwater (Galilee), would arrive on donkeyback leading a motley assemblage of peasants and fishermen, and would be arrested and crucified as a common criminal before miraculously coming back to life a few days later as the savior of the universe—surely these were the ravings, as the pagan philosopher Celsus put it, of “women, slaves, and little children.”

But for those who have been brought up with this narrative and with the idea of a God who was truly a human being—however imperfectly or infrequently expressed or reflected upon—it is very hard indeed to be genuinely confronted with the Christian proclamation in all of its (apparently) scandalous foolishness. Whether one believes it all or not, it is very easy to nod along half-heartedly (a diaper-clad creator? Fine; a god who gets murdered? Sure; a carpenter who saves the universe? Whatever) as though these are the most boringly obvious facts one has ever heard. And it has to be said that all too often Christian preaching and apologetics simply reinforce this view.

By presenting “Christ and him crucified” as something platitudinous and uncontroversial—something to which all right-minded, non-obtuse people should naturally and non-problematically assent—we risk conditioning not just others, but ourselves, against ever taking this outlandish proposition truly seriously. It is an unusual person who would turn his or her life around for the sake of something platitudinous or commonsensical. And yet it is precisely such a turnaround (metanoia), or repentance, that Jesus thinks is required in order to “believe in the good news” (Mk 1:15).

In The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann remarks that the true import of Good Friday:
 

“is often better recognized by non-Christians and atheists than by religious Christians, because it astonishes and offends them. They see the profane horror and godlessness of the Cross because they do not believe the religious interpretations which have given a meaning to the senselessness of this death.”

 
In this light, consider these remarks taken from two of the New Atheists, that no doubt reflect the views of a wider group of non-fools. Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion:
 

“I have described the atonement...as vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which has dulled our objectivity.”

 
And Sam Harris, in Letter to a Christian Nation, writes:
 

“Christianity amounts to the claim that we must love and be loved by a God who approves of the scapegoating, torture, and murder of one man—his son, incidentally—in compensation for the misbehavior and thought-crimes of all others.”

 
Now, as fair descriptions of the theology of the cross, these statements leave much to be desired. But as impressionist reflections on the kind of thing that the crucifixion is—a monstrous affront to, and interruption of, the normal workings of the world (“God’s foolishness,” as Paul puts it)—they are arguably onto something vital to which Christians have inured themselves. While wonderment and incredulity are not quite the same thing, an unbeliever may yet hear strains overlooked by those with ears grown “dull of hearing” (Mt 13:15).
 

Re-encountering the Gospel

 
Dawkins is correct that the problem lies with “ubiquitous familiarity”—not because it undermines our objectivity but rather because it limits our capacity to be shocked and astonished, and thus excited and challenged. It is one thing to believe that Christianity is true. It is quite another to feel amazement that it not only is true, but even could be so, and to (re)build one’s life around it. Many Catholics seem to focus on convincing people only of the former. Perhaps that is one reason why so many Catholics, having been raised and educated in the faith, are so easily able to drift away from it (often without really noticing they are doing so).

But for the growing number of people brought up outside of Christianity, or who have already drifted sufficiently far from it, the possibilities of encountering the Gospel in all its mind-bending splendor are more promising. A context in which the Christian Gospel can be received as scandalous foolery is, as the early church amply demonstrates, equally one in which it can be greeted with surprise as “all that is good and right and true” (Eph 5:9). Viewed in this light, Scripture’s cryptic preference for being hot or cold, as opposed to lukewarm, makes much more sense (Rv 3:15-16).

Naturally, in emphasizing the radical, paradoxical nature of the Christian proclamation, there is a danger of retreating into fideistic obscurity. This, too, is gravely to be avoided: Augustine and Aquinas both caution against (unnecessarily) giving rise to irrisio infidelium, or “the mockery of unbelievers.” My point is not that Christianity is actually foolish, or false or ridiculous—on the contrary! But rather that like so many profoundly true things, it should probably strike us as such on a first and cursory hearing. Compare, for example, the wonders of the universe revealed to us by modern physics: that everything in the universe was once packed into an infinitesimally small space; that the vast majority of a solid object is actually empty space; that there are perhaps a hundred billion galaxies in the universe, each with maybe a hundred billion solar systems and so forth. Popular science writers are adept at carefully explaining how and why all these things are true and the solid reasons we have for believing them. But they also revel in the scandalously foolish appearance of these claims, knowing full well that this is what excites and enthralls their readers.

The earliest Christians were no strangers to such strategies. The second-century apologist St. Melito of Sardis speaks of Christ as “treading upon the earth, yet filling heaven...standing before Pilate, and at the same time sitting with his Father; he was nailed upon the tree, and yet was the Lord of all things.” And as Augustine famously wrote in one of his Christmas homilies: “The maker of man was made man, that the ruler of the stars might suck at the breast; the fountain, thirst...strength, be made weak; health, be wounded; life, die.”

“A stumbling-block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles” this may be, but better that than a platitude to the “non-affiliated” and boredom to the baptized.
 
 
Originally published in America. It is taken from Stephen's forthcoming book titled Faith and Unbelief (Canterbury Press, 2013; Paulist Press, 2014).
(Image credit: Tutt Art)