Hardly the Last Word

I can read most Enlightenment-era atheists without a problem; I taught David Hume and Tom Paine (both of whom or neither of whom was really an atheist, depending on whom you ask) this spring, and although I could reproduce the shapes of their arguments for the sake of teaching them, neither strikes me as particularly convincing.? Likewise Marx, who (again, depending on who’s talking) might not have been an atheist proper but someone who hated the English Protestantism that surrounded him in his writing years for enslaving factory workers and serving as an opium for factory owners’ consciences and who saw humanity’s post-Revolution consciousness as participating in an order so different from what people know now that conventional theological/religious categories would not really apply, never really steered me towards denying Christianity, which I still think adequate to answer his criticisms, if only we would practice what we preach.? Nietzsche was entirely too honest about what would come about with the death of God (namely the end of everything that self-righteous atheists hold dear in polite society) to convince anybody, and Freud is really just Nietzsche for affluent middle class dummies.? I’ve not yet read Dawkins (though I plan to), but his forebear Carl Sagan, while he’s a great popularizer of science, is no philosopher, and his arguments about “the Dark Ages” of Christian Europe ignore so much of what was actually going on that he draws pity from me, not indignation against “religion.”

Ultimately I think that, for reasons of temperament and education and other such factors, I can’t really imagine a polemic-from-outside that would, by force of dialectic or rhetoric, smash down the walls of Christian doctrine.? I remember well that, when my friends underwent the crises of faith that so often characterize the college years (even at Christian colleges), I was more often than not the stable foil to whom they’d come.? I don’t think I was particularly good at playing that role (I have too many former-Christian friends to claim any skill at that), but it was my role nonetheless.

But there was one book I read in college that very nearly imploded my faithfulness to Christian teaching. ?I recently reread and have started writing about that book again recently because its argument so nicely illustrates some of the differences between polemic and didactic and mimetic theology that my dissertation explores.? But reading through it again, eleven years after my first run, I once again found myself asking myself, “If this is what God is, why have anything at all to do with God?”? As I did eleven years ago, I came out of it by revisiting the actual text of the Bible, but nonetheless, the rhetorical power of the book has not diminished despite a decade of living and reading.

What’s the book, you ask?? Martin Luther’s The Bondage of the Will.

I suppose I should add that, in addition to the text of the Bible (the best cure for bad theology, always), the fact that this edition pairs Luther’s treatise with the Erasmus text that occasioned it also helped.? Erasmus, replying to a short publication by Luther, makes a case for treating the Bible as a collection of texts useful for teaching, reproof, and edification, asks rhetorically “… what profit has there been so far from these laborious inquiries, except that with the loss of harmony we love one another the less, while seeking to be wiser than we need” (40). ?He goes on from there to note that the theological disputes of his own day would have been perfectly at home on the World Wide Web:

I do not intend this to refer specifically to Luther, whom I do not know personally, and from whose writings I get a mixed impression. ?I say it rather of certain others better known to me who, if there is any controversy concerning the meaning of the Scriptures, when we bring forward the authority of the Early Fathers, chant at once, “Ah! but they were only men.” ?And if you ask them by what argument the true interpretation of Scripture may be known, since both sides are men, they reply, “By the sign of the Spirit.” ?If you ask why the Spirit should rather be absent from those who have illuminated the world by their published miracles than from themselves, they reply as though for thirteen hundred years there had been no gospel in the world. ?If you seek of them a life worthy of the Spirit, they reply that they are just by faith, not by works. ?If you look in vain for miracles, they say that the age of miracles is past, and that there is no need of them now that we have so much light in the Scriptures. ?And if you deny the Scriptures to be clear in such a point about which so many great men have stumbled in darkness, the argument returns full circle. (45-46)

Erasmus’s case for ethical agency does not present anything radically new, and that’s the main appeal for someone like me: his argument stems from the basic Aristotelian ethical argument, picked up by Thomas Aquinas, that praising and blaming human actions makes most sense when the human being in question could have done otherwise. ?As Erasmus points out, the plentitude of commandments and of conditional promises in the Bible does not directly state but assumes, because of the character of words and the ways they make up our world, that the hearers of God’s oracles and laws and teachings might be faithful to them or not in a given moment. ?He’s careful to note that he does believe in original sin and that human weakness keeps us, unredeemed, from surmounting hamartia, but he’s willing to stop there, to allow original sin to be a judgment on the big picture of human existence, allowing that what human beings have always called good–those virtues of Plato and those virtues of Paul–are good because they partake of the human capacities that God calls good in Genesis.

The Cthulu-God of the Servo

I’ve not read very much of H.P. Lovecraft, but from the few stories I have read in his Cthulu mythology, his contribution to horror fiction was to invent grand entities, impossible to escape or to withstand, that take human life at most as a toy to be played with or snuffed at a whim and at least as less than a distraction. ?When Lovecraft waxes philosophical about living in a universe alongside and under such monstrous entities, he largely invents the modern horror novel, an intellectual space in which human goodness and badness mean precisely nothing and where the fate of human consciousness is less than insignificant to the true players in the universe.

Before I ever heard of H.P. Lovecraft, I got the same feeling from Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will. ?That Christians should confess the sovereignty of God is not disputable, but Luther is not content with a mere affirmation of God’s rulership: he wants to evacuate the vocabulary of rulership, to make the words by which human beings talk about good and evil meaningless when one talks about God:

Thus God hides his eternal goodness and mercy under eternal wrath, his righteousness under iniquity. ?This is the highest degree of faith, to believe him merciful when he saves so few and damns so many, and to believe him righteous when by his own will he makes us necessarily damnable, so that he seems, according to Erasmus, to delight in the torments of the wretched and to be worthy of hatred rather than of love. ?If, then, I could by any means comprehend how this God can be merciful and just who displays so much wrath and iniquity, there would be no need of faith. (138)

Later he makes the same evacuating move:

…it remains absurd (as Reason judges) that a God who is just and good should demand of free choice impossible things; that although free choice cannot will good but is in bondage to sin, he should hold this against it; and that when he does not impart the Spirit, he acts no more mildly or mercifully than if he hardened or permitted to be hardened. ?These things, Reason will repeat, are not the marks of a good and merciful God. ?They are too far beyond her comprehension, and she cannot bring herself to believe that God is good if he acts in this way, but setting aside faith, she wishes to feel and see and understand how he is good and not cruel. ?She would, of course, understand if it were said of God that he hardens no one, damns no one, but has mercy on all, saves all, so that with hell abolished and the fear of death removed, there would be no future punishment to be dreaded. ?That is why she blusters and argues so in the attempt to exonerate God and defend his justice and goodness.

Btu faith and the Spirit judge differently, for they believe that God is good even if he should send all men to perdition. (230)

And one more, just for good measure:

Since, then, God moves and actuates all in all, he necessarily moves and acts in Satan and ungodly man. ?But he acts in them as they are and as he finds them; that is to say, since they are averse and evil, and caught up in the movement of this divine omnipotence, they do nothing but averse and evil things. ?It is like a horseman riding a horse that is lame in one or two of its feet; his riding corresponds to the condition of the horse, that is to say, the horse goes badly. ?But what is the horseman to do? [...] Here you see when God works in and through evil men, evil things are done, and yet God cannot act evilly although he does evil through evil men, because one who is himself good cannot act evilly; yet he uses evil instruments that cannot escape the sway and motion of his omnipotence. (233)

Those are three of the more vivid passages that empty words like good, bad, praise, blame, and responsibility of meaning, but an anti-Aristotelian ideology pervades the text. ?Thus the traditional Biblical predicates of God–that God loves the world, that God is good, that God’s wrath is against the violent–lose all meaning within this text.? I am aware, to some extent, of apophantic theology and its insistence upon analogical rather than univocal meanings of these predicates, but this is something different: human justice and divine are not separated by analogy but by radical incommensurability.? When Luther makes these moves, he destroys any possibility for meaningful talk about ethics, leaving in its place a divinity of formless power, who defines good simply by fiat and with complete disregard for any intelligible meaning for the word and love simply by “what the entity happens to do.” ?Moreover, he renders conditional and imperative sentences meaningless, holding that when they come to a mixed group of the elect and the damned, the same statement simply reminds the former of their inability to carry them through while rendering the latter legally culpable for breaking them. ?(Why an entity not subject to justice would want to make a show Luther considers an impious question, the sort that reveals that the questioner is already among the damned.)

Luther is not always this way; his “On the Freedom of a Christian” in particular comes to my memory as a treatise that holds up the very things that On the Bondage of the Will empties of significance. ?And when he writes as a pastor, he’s hard to beat. ?But this text’s God is ultimately no more intelligible, and thus no more intelligibly good or loving, than Lovecraft’s Cthulu.

And that’s why, in 1998, upon first reading this treatise at the age of 21, I fear that my own horror got the best of me. ?We were assigned this text for an upper-division class on the Continental Reformations, and I’m certain that I was the most vocally resistant to Luther’s arguments. ?I remember distinctly?raising both middle fingers to the heavens?in Dr. Farmer’s class, yelling at professor and classmates, anyone overly impressed with Luther’s “victory” over Erasmus, that if that’s what God is, then… well, I won’t write here what I yelled there.? I’ll just guess, judging by the look that Dr. Farmer gave me, that I had gotten scary in a hurry.

I had read my Nietzsche and my Freud before, my Marx and my Hume.? But this was different; this was someone on the inside declaring God meaningless.? Where a direct assault had failed, an Augustinian monk had nearly imploded Christian theology for me, creating a vacuum where the word “God” once stood. ?Where centuries of tradition had allowed for a plenitude of meaning and goodness, Luther demolished love and justice.? Where everything that I’d picked up in my relatively brief time as a Christian said that God was generous and gracious, Luther would have me believe that, with regards to God, there is no injustice not because of a positive justice but because justice and goodness themselves do not, ultimately, mean anything.? I came to realize in a hurry that, when theological polemic overreaches, it stops being any kind of logos at all, sinking into nihilism.? I knew that whatever shape the Christian tradition would take, it would have to put limits on this kind of polemic theology.

What Came After

My Christian story didn’t end there; although On the Bondage of the Will had done its nihilistic work on my soul, I believe to this day that in the following months and years God set before me enough compelling alternatives that I must attribute the sort of teacher I am today to grace rather than to my own effort.? (Some would say I shouldn’t blame God for such things.)? I don’t think it’s coincidence that, in the second half of that semester, I read Paradise Lost‘s third book for the first time for my term paper in that class, and I also think that Providence, in the following semester, set before me three really good theology classes, one on how the Church has read the Bible through the ages, one on doing ethical theology via close reading of the New Testament, and one that explored the ways that Christians might live out the love of God inside of but not as a part of consumerism.

The next year I started seminary, learning Hebrew and Greek and gaining a familiarity with the text of the Bible that transformed me as a reader of texts and events.? I came be the student of Robert Owens and Fred Norris, of Rodney Werline and Robert Hull.? I read the theology of Augustine and of Aquinas, and I considered new ways of encountering the Bible from Walter Brueggemann and N.T. Wright.? And I learned from David Bosch that Christianity is always a missionary endeavor and from John Milbank that every faithful encounter with Scripture is a time and a place when God signals the true nature of Creation.? As years went by and I grew as a teacher, I moved to Georgia, when I rediscovered John Milton and Dante Allegheri, each of whom is worth a dozen systematic theologians (but then again, I’m a teacher of literature–what do you expect?).? All along the way, the text of the Bible, as I taught it and meditated on it, as I prayed Psalms in the morning and contemplated Job and read the gospels again and again, reminded me, on every encounter, that our Holy Book stands as a genuine gift from God.

I know Luther fans won’t like this, but I do think of On the Bondage of the Will as my forty days in the wilderness. ?Because I refused the nihilism of this treatise, I went on from there able to see the abundance of goodness and grace that the Christian tradition has to offer.

Back to the Luther

So why am I rereading this awful book eleven years later?

Dissertation work.

In the eleven years that have passed, I’ve decided that epic and tragic literature can do things mimetically that traditional theological treatises don’t do well dialectically. ?And I’m taking one of my chapters to explore the shortcomings of dialectic and polemic for such purposes. ?Among the books that I’m using to demonstrate this inadequacy is Luther’s.

I hadn’t anticipated that, eleven years and three graduate degrees (almost) later, Luther’s book would once again almost turn me against God. ?As I said before, I had to offset sections of Luther with sessions reading the actual text of the New Testament gospels just to remind me that Luther’s reading is an ideological one, one that flows from a very particular set of prior philosophical convictions rather than the disclosure of the character of the text itself. ?What angers me when I’ve got Luther open but amuses me when I’ve detoxed is that, inside the book itself, Luther anticipates with obvious relish that people like me will respond as I do. ?He says that folks like me reveal our true colors, our ultimate allegiance to Satan, when we refuse his readings of things. ?He seems to imagine himself a gatekeeper of sorts, throwing out those who insist that God might mean what God says.

Ah, well. ?It takes all kinds. ?You can see plainly enough who watches over this blog. ?Look to the upper right corner, and take comfort that Desiderus is praying for us. ?And reading carefully.

by ngilmour