In my last post a couple of weeks ago, I talked about Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas. I mentioned bringing back “On the Incarnation” by St. Athanasius with me. I almost done with it and it is superb. That is not the only book I picked there. I also brought a new book back home with me titled, “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemis” by David Bentley Hart. I’ve only read a couple of chapters, but so far it is wonderful.

I have mentioned a couple of times now that I am convinced that it took a while for the “counter-cultural” message of Christianity took several centuries to take root and actually change Western Civilization. In his book, Hart is essentially arguing along these lines. He is taking on the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (the “fashionable enemies”). He points out that the ever-present assault from secular thought has wore us down and we have forgotten the good the Christianity brought to the West. So the book is a look back, a reminder of this past. Why? Well he give the reason at the end of the introduction as:

Over time, our capacity to forget can make everything seem unexceptional and predictable, even things that are actually quite remarkable and implausible. The most important function of historical reflection is to wake us from too complacent a forgetfulness and to recall us to a knowledge of things that should never be lost to memory. And the most important function of Christian history is to remind us not only of how we came to be modern men and women, or of how Western Civilization was shaped, but also of something of incalculable wonder and inexpressible beauty, the knowledge of which can still haunt, delight, torment, and transfigure us (p. XIV).

I am moved in reading that. Because “incalculable wonder and inexpressible beauty” always points us to our God. From there he starts to take on authors like Hitchens, who wrote the book, “God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” Hitchens’ thesis is that the world would be a better place without religion, because it is actually religion that is at the root of evil and suffering in the world. Of course, without religion, can we call something evil..in an absolute sense? Bentley challenges this thesis right from the start with this statement:

What I find most mystifying in the arguments of the authors I have mentioned…is the strange presupposition that a truly secular society would of its nature be more tolerant and less prone to violence than any society shaped by any form of faith. Given that the modern age of secular governance has been the most savagely and sublimely violent period in human history, by a factor (or a body count) of incalculable  magnitude, it is hard to identify the grounds for their confidence…It is not even entirely clear why these authors imagine that a world entirely purged of faith would choose to be guided by moral prejudices remotely similar to their own; and the obscurity becomes especially impenetrable to me in the case of those who seem to believe that a thoroughgoing materialism informed by Darwinism biology might actually aid us in forsaking our “tribalism” and “irrationality” and in choosing instead to live in tolerant concord with one another. After all, the only ideological or political factions that have made any attempt at an ethics consistent with Darwinian science, to this point at least, have been the socialist eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and the Nazi movement that sprang from it (p. 14).

That is quite a statement and you might want to reread so that you can digest it. Because I have one more long quote for you to take in.

It should be uncontroversial…to say that if the teachings of Christianity were genuinely to take root in human hearts–if indeed we all believed that God is love and that we ought to love our neighbors as ourselves–we should have no desire for war, should hate injustice worse than death, and should find indifference to the sufferings of others impossible. But, in fact, human beings will continue to make war, and to slay the innocent and the defenseless with cheerful abandon; they will continue to distract themselves from themselves, and from their mortality, and from morbid boredom by killing and dying on a magnificent scale, and by exulting in their power to destroy one another…Christians have no choice but to continue to believe in the power of the gospel to transform the human will from an engine of cruelty, sentimentality, and selfishness into a vessel of divine grace, capable of union with God and love of one’s neighbor.

Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inestinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but who was himself one of them, murdered by the combined authority and moral prudence of the political, religious, and legal powers of human society.

Which is, incidentally, the most subversive claim ever made in the history of the human race (P. 17-18).

Shane+