Protestantism and Atheism

Alister McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism includes the provocative thesis that the Protestant Reformation helped lead to the ascendancy of atheism over the past centuries... he may be right--and we may be more prone than ever to a similar fault today.

Alister McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World is intended to be provocative. Those who might disagree with his main thesis, that atheism's day is passing away, may be the ones the most challenged in it, but they won't be the only ones.

He traces the rise of atheism as a dominant belief system from the Enlightenment, through Feuerbach, Freud, Marx, and Darwin. He contends that atheism is rarely the result of pure rational thought; that far more often, it's a reaction to a controlling church--often with the backing of the state.

It's not only the atheists, though, that will find something here to think about. He suggests (somewhat tentatively) that atheism arose partly because of, surprisingly, the Protestant Reformation. He's a Protestant himself, and he is by no means arguing against Protestant belief. But he points to one aspect of the Reformation that may have been a serious error.

One of the mistakes of Catholicism had been to replace the word of God with ritual and iconography. A typical Catholic worshiper would have little knowledge of the truths of God but would have a rich set of impressions about God, based in church art, the mysteries of the Mass, and a host of other symbolisms. The Reformation rightly placed the Word of God back at the center of Christian life (that's not the error, of course--I'm getting to it in a moment).

Protestants put the pulpit instead of the altar at the center of the church, and emphasized preaching and study. They may have over-corrected, especially Zwingli, by centering the Christian life too purely in the mind. It was no longer a whole-person experience.

The next step from that (says McGrath) was a failure of imagination, and Protestantism simply became uninteresting--largely from a lack of art and other forms of expression. (He says the same has happened now to atheism, and recounts the long sordid story of Madalyn Murray O'Hair as evidence.)

You can see McGrath's Christianity Today article on The Twilight of Atheism for more.

I'm not sure if he's right, but all this reminds me of a tendency I feel--and many others, I'm sure--to disconnect from the real world around me. Many now are tempted to center their days in a virtual rather than a real world. Do you check the weather every morning by looking out the window, or by looking at the report on your computer? (I confess--sometimes I check the computer first myself. Nasty habit.)

Part of the remedy for this is in real relationships with God's people, part of it is in appreciating God's creation, and part of it is in art. One person I know of who seems to understand this as well as anyone is photographer Kirk Jordan, who sends photos with comments to an email list you can join (write him at mightyworks@cyberback.com). Most of his photographs are of nature; all of them are excellent and creative. His comments combine a refreshing sense of humor with an awareness of God in the world.

I also get a good sense of this from the music of Fernando Ortega. His song, "This Time Next Year," for example, tells about a grandparent and grandson:

This time next year you'll want to take him
Behind the old road behind your house
To show him the sun on the autumn fields
Smell the wind-blown alfalfa
To look out where the geese are rising for their southern flight
Circling arrows in the sky above the ditches and the gardens

Is this a song about God? Yes!!! There's no mention of the Name in it, but I know Fernando from years back, and I know his entire body of music. His love for God is real, and it's very connected to where he lives--where we live.

Hmm... I've been talking lately about "Thinking Christian(ly)." It's not all mental, is it?

Posted: Wed - April 6, 2005 at 09:08 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Protestantism and Atheism

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson