Tom Morris

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The meaning of faith contra Karen Armstrong

I just found this Karen Armstrong article on The Times. It’s part of her standard routine of “you don’t understand faith, look deeper, it’s all about mythos not logos” stuff. I don’t buy a word of it, personally.

Take this segment: the meaning of the word “belief” changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as believers as though accepting orthodox dogma on faith were their most important activity.

There’s lots wrong with this.

Firstly, there’s the idea that we’ve somehow fallen away from the true understanding of faith and belief. That before some kind of modern fall into dogmatic fundamentalism, there was some much more mystic, less orthodox and authoritarian understanding of faith.

It hit me how historically poor this treatment is when I read a quote from John Calvin in Alvin Plantinga’s essay “Christian Philosophy at the End of the 20th Century” (I read it in James F. Sennett’s The Analytic Theist, but you can read a fairly badly formatted PDF of it here). Plantinga argues that faith is a kind of knowledge, and uses Calvin’s Institutes to give an example: faith, Calvin says, is a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence to us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ. Plantinga is right: faith is not just some happy magical feeling, it’s neither merely figurative nor hyperbole - faith is a cognitive process of some sort. And acceptance of doctrines is part of faith.

Armstrong again: This rationalised interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. The defensive piety popularly known as fundamentalism erupted in almost every major faith during the 20th century. In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favour of logos, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted Scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion

Let’s see: modern Christian fundamentalism of the sort found in the United States can be traced back to the 18th century, but really started being important in the latter half of the 19th century with people like Dwight L. Moody, eventually emerging as a movement with Dixon and Torrey’s The Fundamentals. Meanwhile, atheism and agnosticism go back much further - with many ancient Greeks doubting or denying the existence of God: Epicurus, Diagoras of Melos, Protagoras, the Atomist philosophers, Democritus and Leucippus. Seventeenth and eighteenth century atheists like Baron d’Holbach and Diderot (and maybe Marlowe, if the rumours are true!) and into the nineteenth century with Shelley, Marx, Nietzsche and Bradlaugh: all of these predate the development of the modern fundamentalist movement.

And Armstrong’s insistence that fundamentalism is a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favour of logos is ridiculous. Watch this collection of clips from Jesus Camp and tell me that this is somehow wholly rational or scientific! It’s absolute madness: there’s crying everywhere, draining emotional psychodrama, all the talk of personal relationship, talk of fire and redemption. Maybe watch this clip of someone screaming about cell phone anointings (imagine answering your phone and getting some nutcase screaming down the phone about getting touched by God) and getting “blitzed” with the Spirit with a sort of voodoo trance-inducing drumbeat in the background. It’s the fundamentalists who accept all the “gifts of the spirit” stuff - speaking in tongues, prophecy and all that stuff. The guys getting blitzed and crying and rolling around on the floor have the beliefs of fundamentalists, not the beliefs of Unitarians or Anglicans. If this is wholly rational, scientific, I hate to imagine what irrational superstition is for Armstrong.

Armstrong then says that Dawkins, Hitchens et al. have only bothered to respond to the God conceptions of fundamentalist Christianity and Islam. Funny, I’m pretty sure I read a whole section in Hitchens’ book on the religions of the Far East - Buddhism, Hinduism and so on.

Armstrong also says that the “New Atheists” refuse, on principle, to have dialogue with theologians who are more representative of mainstream tradition. What, like the mild-mannered Richard Harries, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Oxford and now King’s College professor Alister McGrath. I’d say that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the former Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford are about as representative of the mainstream Christian tradition as you can get.

Armstrong: As a result, their analysis is disappointingly shallow, because it is based on such poor theology. (What exactly is good theology? I keep asking this question and I don’t ever get a sensible result. I mean, I can tell you what good history is - fits with the facts and explains the evidence we have without having to introduce too much wild speculation - or good science or good philosophy. But what is good theology?) The response from Dawkins et al. is perfectly sensible here: if you deny the initial premise (namely, the existence of God), all the stuff that follows on from that is of no consequence at all. If there is no God, all the theological discussion is utterly pointless.

Armstrong then says Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is “nothing” out there; in making these assertions their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence. Oh yeah? Names please. Because, well, when the whole Death of God thing happened in the sixties, with books published like Bishop John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God, drawing upon the Neo-Orthodox thinking of Karl Barth, the writings of people like Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann and Niebuhr, there was quite a lot of controversy as if something new was happening. If the historical roots of the theological radicalism of the 20th century go back so much further, some citations would be nice. And I don’t ask that cynically - my interest in the history of religion is one of little professional or academic training. But Armstrong’s statement doesn’t pass my gut test, at least not without some references.

I’m very interested in collecting statements that directly contradict the fluffy liberalism of Armstrong’s conception of faith. Anyone got any suggestions? The idea that the history of religion is all Don Cupitt-style anti-realist/Sea of Faith type belief punctuated with the odd outburst of Jerry Falwell-style fundamentalism just doesn’t pass the gut check for me. It’s a very bold claim, and a few lines in an editorial for The Times is not enough to back it up.

Some philosophical video for you to enjoy: Bernard Williams talking to Brian Magee about Descartes. Part 1, 2, 3 and 4. Which reminds me: I must get back to reading Williams’ Sense of the Past.