Author Richard Dawkins defines faith as “belief without Âevidence”. In fact, faith often seems to involve gymnastic contortions to keep the evidence at bay.
Take the outraged letters from some Christian readers in response to the Mail & Guardian‘s recent religion edition. Particularly at issue was the statement, in the article “Was Jesus the first socialist?”, that Jesus wrongly predicted his disciples would witness the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven in their lifetime.
This is not an esoteric quibble — it concerns the key doctrine of Christ’s divinity. How could God, fortelling his own kingdom, make such an error?
The correspondents are convinced the article is wrong, but less unanimous about why. One suggests the relevant Gospel passage refers to “Christ’s later transfiguration, or the growth of the church after Christ’s ascension”, another that the Kingdom “related to the lordship of Christ in men’s hearts”. Howick’s Hammer of the Moffies, Robert de Neef, insists Christ’s prediction was not time-specific.
For the facts, readers are referred to Matthew 24, which other Gospels repeat.
Answering his disciples’ question “What will be the signal for your coming and the end of the age?” Jesus relates what they themselves will experience. They will hear the noise of battle, be handed over for execution, see the “abomination of desolation” prophesied by Daniel, and so on.
Christ graphically describes the celestial portents before the Son of Man descends “on clouds of heaven with great power and glory” — the sun and moon will darken and the stars fall. This hardly suggests a metaphysical event in human hearts (or, incidentally, a godlike understanding of the cosmos we know from radio astronomers).
De Neef may have his own private text, available only to the chosen, but the New English Bible then quotes Jesus as urging his disciples to “stay awake” and warning: “When you see all these things, you may know that the end is near, at the very door. I tell you this: the present Âgeneration will live to see it all.”
Case closed. In fact, Matthew 24 tallies with many other Gospel passages that underscore Christ’s burning belief in the imminence of the Kingdom and his role in realising it. He says it has “come near”, that God has “cut short the time”, that it will come before his disciples have passed through all the towns of Israel, and that his audience “will not taste death” before it arrives, for example.
Historian Michael Grant, an admirer of Jesus, at least has the intellectual courage to face the facts. “It is little use trying to explain that [Christ] did not really mean what he said,” he writes in his book Jesus. “The historian has to assume that he meant what he said and that, in consequence, he was wrong.” This had caused Christian theologians “considerable distress”, he adds.
De Neef and another pious queer-basher, Eleanor Poulter, respond in a similarly evasive way to the M&G’s observation that Christ nowhere mentions homosexuality.
Their rationalisation of this inconvenient fact is that condemning homosexuality was “a no-brainer” for Jesus, not worth raising, as “every Jew knew acts of sexual perversion were forbidden”. Suddenly, Christ is not a God who transcends space and time, but an ordinary Jew of his age, prey to all its prejudices.
Yet it is precisely Christ’s daring non-conformism — his repeated clashes with religious authority, scorn for the prim and proper, and extolling of compassion over rules — that fascinates and gives his ministry lasting significance.
Besides, homophobia is obviously not the same “no-brainer” as the ban on murder or theft. Millions of Christians, indeed whole denominations, do not consider it sinful; the United States’s mainstream Episcopalian Church ordains gay priests.
Of course for De Neef et al, who have a corner on Christian truth, these are mere “heretics and Âapostates” (he could have added “schismatics” for truly medieval effect). It seems the stridently Âbigoted and those puffed up with their own righteousness are to inherit the earth, not the meek.
De Neef says he is an engineer. Why do some people, rational in other spheres, become stubbornly irrational in matters of faith? How, for example, can millions of Americans, in the world’s most technically advanced society, negate 150 years of progress in geology, anthropology and evolutionary genetics by insisting the world is 6 000 years old?
The answer must lie in the psychological realm — unlike scientific knowledge, faith is bound up with personal identity and life-purpose. And certain personality types seem to have a craving for absolute certainty and ideological self-surrender. She closes her letter: “A SINNER SAVED ONLY BY THE GRACE OF GOD” (her capitals).
Authoritarians in church and state have encouraged this mentality, which stands in stark contrast to the systematic doubt, the modelling and remodelling of reality, that underpins scientific method. St Paul preaches justification by pure faith, while St Augustine denounces “the disease of curiosity”.
And there is an intimate connection between unreasoning belief and militant intolerance of unorthodoxy. The world needs Christ’s humanitarian values. What it definitely does not need is blind faith and submission.
Drew Forrest is deputy editor