Author: Matthew Sitman

by Matthew Sitman

Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a new biography of the German theologian and pastor killed by the Nazis and a hero to many conservative evangelicals in America, has reviewers asking the question. I can’t say if he meant for this to be a wink and a nod or not, but Timothy Larsen begins by noting Bonhoeffer’s rather fastidious attention to what he wore:

You could illustrate almost every momentous turning point in his life with sartorial commentary. When he takes a pastoral internship in Spain, he bombards the senior minister with written inquiries regarding the proper formal wear for dinner parties. The poor, overworked man eventually remarked sarcastically that the new intern should bring his preaching robe.

Bonhoeffer was thrilled by the writings of Barth, but his confidence in the brilliant theologian was shaken when he first met him and observed that he lacked dress sense. When Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s student and close friend, arrived at his underground seminary, Bonhoeffer was identified as “the sporty dresser.” He even arranged to get his favorite brown suit delivered to him in prison.

About that “close friend”:

Marsh makes a convincing case that Bonhoeffer harbored feelings for Bethge that extended beyond friendship. Those feelings were unrequited, and Bonhoeffer probably did not consciously acknowledge them. Still, Marsh notes, he was possessive and smothering in his attention. He created a joint bank account and sent Christmas cards signed, “Dietrich and Eberhard.”
This turns into a major, recurring theme in Strange Glory. It fascinated me at first, but I grew tired of Marsh directing the camera angle of every scene so as to rather heavy-handedly keep it in view. Particularly regrettable is his decision to describe this relationship using words from Emily Dickinson—”The heart wants what the heart wants”—given the association between the quotation and Woody Allen’s use of it to justify unsavory behavior.

Bonhoeffer, by contrast, was so sexually innocent that I would not assume Athanasius himself surpassed him in this regard. Any such possible desires for Bethge appear sublimated and regulated. Even Bonhoeffer’s physical relationship with his fiancée, Maria—whom Marsh says Bonhoeffer was “smitten” by—comprised only a solitary occasion when, as a prisoner, he kissed her on the cheek in the presence of the public prosecutor. In a late prison letter, Bonhoeffer observed that he had lived a full life even though he would die a virgin.

In a review of the book we flagged last month, John Stackhouse Jr. picked up on the theme as well, remarking, “Marsh defends the chastity of the two men, but one wonders if Marsh might usefully have hinted less and ruminated more.” Meanwhile, after reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison – which partly consists of the correspondence between Bonhoeffer and Bethge – Wesley Hill argued last month that the relationship between desire and friendship can be complicated:

What struck me in reading [the Bonhoeffer-Bethge letters], perhaps in contrast to Marsh and Stackhouse’s views, was how unwieldy our categories are—either “homosexual” or “just friends”—when it comes to classifying a relationship as profound as Bonhoeffer and Bethge’s was.

Years after their exchange of letters, and after Bonhoeffer’s death, Bethge fielded a question from a member of an audience who had gathered to hear him speak about his old friend. Surely, the questioner said, “it must [have been] a homosexual partnership” that existed between you and Bonhoeffer—after all, what else could Bonhoeffer’s impassioned letters have signaled? Bethge responded by saying, no, he and Bonhoeffer were “quite normal.” But perhaps an even better response would have been to query that idea of “normal.” Better, perhaps, for Bethge to have explored whether friendship and erotic love might be (in the words of Rowan Williams) “different forms of one passion—the passion for life-giving interconnection.” Pursuing this line of thought might not give us a “celibate gay” Bonhoeffer, but it also might not yield a “just-friends-with-no-hint-of-eros” Bonhoeffer.

Previous Dish on Bonhoeffer here, here and here.

by Matthew Sitman

In the wake of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s rather dismissive comments about philosophy’s usefulness, Rebecca Goldstein defends its enduring value – especially for the non-religious:

Philosophy is important because it’s unavoidable if you want to live a coherent life. To live such a life is to use standards to justify your beliefs and actions; it’s to try to bring as much internal consistency into your various beliefs as possible; it’s to consider which of our seemingly intuitive views about the nature of the world and our place within it are compatible with what science has to tell us, which are incompatible, and which are absolutely necessary.

Now whether one likes it or not, such coherence-making thinking involves one in issues of philosophy. Secularists, in particular, who want to counter the false claim that without God to ground morality there can only be nihilism, should be particularly interested in moral philosophy, since that’s where they’ll find the counter-arguments.

Goldstein goes on to clarify how she views philosophy’s relationship to science:

I think there’s often a misunderstanding about the nature of philosophy. Some seem to think philosophy to be in competition with science in the project of describing reality—in other words, ontology. But that’s not really the proper job of philosophy at all. It can’t, and shouldn’t, compete with science in this domain.

And how does one know this? From good philosophical arguments, that’s how. Science, even in making out its case for ontological superiority, has to rely on philosophy in order to make it coherently. It has to step outside of itself and offer a clear criterion for what makes some description scientific and others not, and offer a defense that its methodology actually gets us closer to knowing reality. It relies on philosophy to render its own claims coherent.

More generally, if you want to know what the role of philosophy is you should think of it more in terms of maximizing our overall coherence—including our internal moral coherence—than in terms of describing reality, as science does.

Also responding to deGrasse Tyson, M. Anthony Mills elaborates on how philosophy and science differ:

[T]he division of labor is not that philosophy is speculative while physics is not; rather, each discipline looks for different kinds of answers. Modern physics can ask speculative questions such as, “When did the universe begin?” or more practical questions such as, “How can we infer the existence of a planet by observing gravitational effects?” In either case, the answers depend on empirical and experimental evidence.

Modern philosophy, by contrast, asks questions such as, “What does it mean to accept the truth of a scientific theory?” Crucially, philosophical answers rely on different forms of evidence: not observations, but sound reasoning. A philosophy of science isn’t a theory alongside scientific theories, but a framework for evaluating such theories.

DeGrasse Tyson is right that such questions are not usually germane to the working scientist. But that doesn’t render them superfluous or counterproductive. Scientific progress not only requires the day-to-day work of “practitioners,” but also those who see the proverbial forest. Revolutionary thinkers break out of accepted paradigms and question received wisdom; they engage in precisely the kind “question-asking” for which deGrasse Tyson would banish philosophy.

by Matthew Sitman

In an NPR interview last week, Louis C.K. unpacked the comments he made, critical of some atheists’ certainty that God doesn’t exist, during his opening monologue when he hosted SNL in March (seen above):

[S]omething I’ve learned over the years is that when you talk about religion, you want to talk to religious people. Even if you’re talking about something that’s contrary religiously or provocative, a religious audience is a better audience for that. If you talk to a bunch of cool atheists in leather and suede, you know, sucking on their vape sticks or whatever they’re doing, they’re not going to get it because they don’t even think about God. It’s not even on their radar, you know? So they’re – but if you tell religious people, I don’t know if there’s a God, I don’t think there’s a heaven, where’s God’s ex-wife, these things, they have a connection to it that means something. …

I feel like the math in my head tells me that we’re just – that everything is just science and randomness and patterns but the main thing I feel is that it’s a great mystery. I feel like I need to be humbled before the mysteries of life. I have no idea what’s caused all of this.

In response, Chris Stedman questions C.K.’s understanding of what atheism entails:

This isn’t the first time C.K. has offered confusing statements about atheism; in a 2011 Reddit Q&A he said both “I’m not an atheist” and “I don’t ‘Believe in god,’” and suggested that he does not consider himself an atheist because he doesn’t know for sure that there is no God.

It seems that a lot of this confusion boils down to differing definitions of atheism. If atheism means knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are no gods, then C.K. is right. But that definition of atheism doesn’t fit most of the atheists I know. In fact, it runs up against something many atheists value: Doubt.

As an atheist, I never want to be too certain about what I believe. I strive to continually test and retest my assumptions, comparing them against new information and data as I encounter it. My atheism is curious, reflecting both a willingness to be wrong and a constant desire to learn.

So let’s clear the air: Being an atheist does not require absolute certainty. It doesn’t mean you rule out the possibility of divine or supernatural entities existing. Instead, it is the position that such a possibility is unlikely, and that the case for God hasn’t been adequately made yet.

by Matthew Sitman

http://youtu.be/8U1Jv5JoxaM

Timothy Tutt makes the case for doing so, arguing that Satan is “clearly a theological construct found in many cultures and dolled up differently over time”:

In the earliest traditions of Hebrew scripture, both good and evil were God’s domain. Satan appeared in the books of Job and Zechariah. At first, he worked for God. In the Book of Job, the devil functions as something of a chief-of-staff, checking up on God’s lower level employee. (Some readers may be confused by this and think of the devil as tricky tempter right from the get-go, as in the Garden of Eden. Remember, even though the Book of Genesis is printed first in the Bible, it was not written first.)

As centuries went by, Satan became testier and more independent. He began to oppose God with accusations that tempt humans. The devil moved from God’s employee to less-than-loyal opposition. This move was, in part, because Persian thinking seeped into Judaism. For three years (from about 700-300 BCE), Persia ruled a huge chunk of land from the Indus River to Greece, including what is now Palestine and Israel. Even after the Persian Empire declined, their thinking remained. The Persian philosophy saw the world as a struggle of good and bad.

By the time that Christianity grew out of Judaism, the devil was a full-fledged bad boy, the enemy of God and humans alike.

In a follow-up article, Tutt finds belief in a literal, personal Satan doesn’t fit with his understanding of Christianity:

Satan works well if you’re into fear and punishment. But that’s not what Christianity is about.

Christianity is about grace and love. And grace and love are like poker. They require taking risks and gambling.

If someone hits you on one cheek, let him or her hit you on the other, Jesus said. In a religion of rules, the cheek-slapper would be punished. In a faith of grace, the cheek-slapper just might be so overwhelmed by your gentleness that he or she gives up cheek-slapping. (Of course, that might not happen. That’s the risky grace of the gospel. It’s a lot like holding a straight in your hands and hoping your opponent only has three of a kind.) …

Let me be clear: Evil exists in the world. We must wrestle with that. But old constructs need to be tossed. The Christian church clung to a flat-earth cosmology far too long. Preachers used the Bible to defend slavery. Luther and then other Reformers changed theological views of communion from transubstantiation to consubstantiation to symbolism. Each move required risk.

Recent Dish on the devil here.

by Matthew Sitman

From ages 17 to 23, Jessica Misener was a born-again Christian. And then she went to graduate school at Yale, learned a bit of Hebrew and Greek, delved into studying Scripture, and eventually lost her faith, which “hinged almost solely on believing the Bible to be the literal, inspired word of God”:

More and more, I realized that the Bible was a flawed, messy, deeply human book — and that in treating it as an unimpeachable guidebook for life in the 21st century, many conservative Christians were basing their entire worldviews on a text that, in my opinion, wasn’t that much different from any other historical collection of letters and stories. I was forced to confront the fact that I’d converted into a pre-fab worldview: one hatched largely in recent American history from Jonathan Edwards and the theology of the Great Awakening, and one that “family values” politics has buoyed through modern decades.

This was something the evangelical students in my program at Yale talked about often: the behemoth of doubt that sets in as your airtight hermeneutic of scripture is drained from the bottom. Christians from other traditions didn’t have it so bad…We evangelicals, with our infallible view of scripture ripped from our hands, were left gasping for air. If you crumple and toss out a literal reading of the Bible, then what does it mean to talk about Jesus literally dying for your sins?

There are places in Misener’s essay that elicit empathy and interest, especially her descriptions of what faith did in her life – how she liked who she was as a Christian, and how she misses the meaning that religion offered. But I find it utterly baffling to assume – as she implicitly does – that our options for reading the Bible amount to a choice between the evangelical belief in Scripture’s “inerrancy” and the view that it’s little more than an unreliable jumble of tall tales and fables.

This is all the more curious given that, by her own admission, the evangelical position she once held is something of a modern innovation, and that most Christian traditions outside of evangelicalism, such as the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox ones, to say nothing of more liberal strains of Protestantism, hold different and often more nuanced and complex understandings of the Bible. In fact, out of fairness to my evangelical friends, I’d even say that within conservative evangelical theological circles you can find approaches to the Bible that uphold inerrancy without reducing it to a simplistic literalism. Misener doesn’t seem to show any interest in any these alternatives. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it’s worth emphasizing that what she describes as a kind of personal revelation – the Bible is “messy,” and doesn’t really hold up well when read literally – is something that countless theologians and thinkers throughout Church history have affirmed, commented on, and tried to understand. Dreher is on the same page:

It’s a false choice to say that either Scripture is 100 percent infallible in a literal sense, or that none of it is reliable. It’s rather that Scripture requires an authoritative interpretive community, which is the Church. When are we free to read Scripture as a metaphor, and when must we accept it literally? Both [Roman and Orthodox] churches have answers to this, but they aren’t simple answers, and they aren’t strictly binding. You can find Orthodox Christians who believe that Genesis is literally true, and must be affirmed as such, and you can find Orthodox Christians who believe that Genesis is a “true myth” — that is, a symbolic story, like parables, through which God reveals foundational truths about Creation that are beyond the comprehension of us finite creatures (that’s what I believe, for the record).

Now maybe, ultimately, Misener wouldn’t find these alternative ways of approaching the Bible persuasive either. Many don’t, and I sincerely respect them. Or perhaps, after being burned by evangelicalism, Misener just wanted nothing to do with religion – as someone who grew up in a rather severe fundamentalist church, I’m sympathetic to that impulse. There are good reasons to be an agnostic or atheist, and even those of us who continue to be attached to Christianity, which I am, grapple with doubt, uncertainty, and dark nights of the soul. I have to say, though, that the intellectual bankruptcy of certain forms of American evangelicalism strikes me as problematic grounds for jettisoning Christianity.

But most of all, Misener’s essay points to the sad state of so much American religious life, especially the messages delivered by too many Christian churches. She makes clear that, at times, she still feels “a wave of something truly ineffable, a surreal flutter in my soul that the world was vast and overwhelming and rich and meaningful and also not really fucking meaningful at all.” That’s something most of us have felt, I’d guess, whether believer or not. It’s a pity that the brittle, ahistorical, and ultimately untenable evangelicalism she was peddled convinced her that those feelings are alien to Christianity, that faith demands the silencing of doubt and uncertainty. It’s a shame that too many Christian churches present the Bible in such a way that, when an earnest young person encounters the historical-critical approach to it, the result is shock and perplexity. It’s lamentable that more churches aren’t places where such difficulties can be worked through, where you feel welcome even if you are far from having what you believe figured out. Pope Francis has said that the Church should be a “hospital for sinners,” which is to say a refuge for all of us who struggle in all kinds of ways, profound doubt included. Misener’s story is testimony to how far Christians have to go to make the Pope’s words a reality.