I was reading a book review by Christopher Hitchens some time ago when I started at something he wrote, something which seemed too outrageous even for a man who would go on to write God Is Not Great. He referred to what he understood to be a widely accepted Christian vision of heaven, namely, that it consists of all those who are “saved” standing and praising God in an eternal church service. That, Hitchens declared, sounds like what most people would consider hell.

My first thought, upon reading his audacious claim, was: Can he say that? There was more to the review, so unless he wrote the entire piece and then added that sentence as an afterthought, it seemed that God had not struck him dead. My second thought, the sort that slips out before our better training and self-righteousness kick in, was: I think he’s right.

I felt really guilty for thinking it. Thankfully there was no lightning. I suppose we all have blasphemous thoughts from time to time, or maybe it’s just the sinners among us. Only lately I’ve been thinking, maybe it’s not blasphemy. There is that bit about saints casting their crowns at the feet of the Lamb, but it’s not entirely clear, after all, that there won’t be food and naps and touch football, too. Further, there’s the original Garden, and Adam’s first, delightful work, before he got tongue-tied and failed to stand up for his woman in the moment of truth. Surely that’s evidence, isn’t it, that heaven will be more than one eternal church service?

But it’s interesting that this is what Hitchens absorbed as the Christian theory of heaven. I wonder if he absorbed, likewise, the doctrine that seems prevalent in some Christian circles, that of a perpetually furious God. It’s not an official doctrine, but a theme that emerges gradually from the lips of some Christians. Yes, Jesus loves us, yes, God is merciful, but oh boy are those homosexuals and Babylonians and a good many of our so-called brethren going to get it, and good.

I had a friend, a new Christian back when I wasn’t a Christian, who told me how he went to the front of his church and announced that a lot of people in the sanctuary were going to hell, where they were going to burn and burn and burn. Apparently someone got him started reading the Bible, and he was zealously working his way through the Old Testament. I’d already formed that impression, of God being really angry, from being dragged to my grandmother’s Baptist church as a child, as well as — oddly, given how little else we read in my high school — from studying “Sinners In the Hands of An Angry God.”

It’s at once unfair and telling to examine what someone picks up about a subject by random osmosis. Unfair, in this case, because an ignorant new Christian, an unrepresentative sample from a particular sect, and a hell-obsessed essay hardly constitute a definitive treatment of Christian doctrine. Yet this is how people formulate opinions about Christianity, isn’t it, through the random assemblage of what they read or what they hear a televangelist say or what someone who professes the faith tells them?

(At this point my Calvinist friends are gritting their teeth over my use of the word “random,” while my Limbaugh/Hannity/O’Reilly-following friends are shaking their heads that I didn’t list the biased media in my explanation for mistaken impressions of Christian doctrine.)

I suppose it’s like anything else, we gravitate to certain attributes of God, or certain elements of doctrine, and amplify them. Presbyterians talk about predestination, Catholics about the grace of Mary, and so on. So some of us focus on God’s mercy, and others on his anger, and I suspect that somewhere behind our fumbling recitations of doctrine is the true God, at once more majestic and awful than we can imagine. I’m sure I don’t understand him so well myself, even after these eleven years of wrestling. I’m just thankful none of us gets to define him.

Famed atheist Christopher Hitchens took a podium next to his brother Peter Hitchens, a Christian, last Thursday in a debate sponsored by Michigan’s Grand Valley State University. Peter, a member of the church of England, is a journalist, like Christopher — the author of God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything. Their parents raised them as nominal Anglicans.

Peter worked for London’s Daily Express for over 20 years, but left the paper in 2000 shortly before a pornographer bought it. He now writes a Sunday column for the Daily Mail, the Express‘ competitor, in addition to keeping a blog, appearing on radio programs and doing freelance work for other papers.

Peter Hitchens told WoW that reporting on wars and living in Russia has shown him the worth of religion. “They intensify your humility, because you’re exposed, without particular protection,” he said. Parenthood and “the normal temptations of life, when you find out you’re not as terrific as you think you are,” have increased his sense of humility.

But music and the arts suggest to Peter, that, contrary to John Lennon, there is more above us than sky. He believes that Beethoven’s music existed in eternity before the artist put the notes on paper. “There’s a solace in music which I don’t understand,” he said. “I think the origin of much of music is in religion.”

In an interview with the Grand Rapids Press before the debate, Peter said he was at a disadvantage with his brother because he didn’t have Christopher’s certainty: “I can’t definitively say I’m right and he’s wrong. … What I’m saying is this is what I choose to believe.”

The brothers have other significant differences. Christopher supports the war in Iraq; Peter opposes it. Peter lives in England while Christopher has immigrated and become a U.S. citizen. An apparently atheist-heavy crowd applauded Christopher when the two argued about the existence of God but seemed divided in the first part of the debate when the brothers debated the war in Iraq.

Christopher likened Christianity to a “celestial North Korea” in which God can “convict you of thought crimes in your sleep.” “At least you can f—–g die and leave North Korea,” he said.

Peter said his brother enjoyed “the luxury of atheism,” promoting atheism as an ideal, but not dealing with the despair and violence it seems to inspire in English young people and its affect on whole in countries — like North Korea. Christianity can’t be replaced by a blank space, he said.

“You do have to give people hope, when they’ve done things that are grievous and intolerable,” he said. “And what hope is there, besides a sacrifice?”

This year, Americans made bestsellers out of Christopher Hitchens’ blunt book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About Christianity? Hitchens and D’Souza hotly debated the merits of religion, but another book seems to have muddled the debate.

In the Netherlands, this book about God’s existence (or nonexistence, rather) hit the bestsellers list, too. The title is full of paradoxes: Believing in a God Who Does Not Exist: Manifesto of an Atheist Pastor. So is the author: Klaas Hendrikse, a Dutch Protestant pastor for over 20 years, and an avowed atheist.

Hendrikse rejects the idea of God’s existence but embraces the language of religion, using the word God to refer to relationships between human beings. “God is for me not a being, but a word for what can happen between people,” Hendrikse writes. “Someone says to you, for example, ‘I will not abandon you’ and then makes those words come true. It would be perfectly alright to call that [relationship] God.”

Hendrikse’s book is in its third printing, but Ecumenical News International said both atheists and religious people are looking at Hendrikse askance. The Volksrant, a secular newspaper, called his outlook “bizarre” and compared the pastor to a vegetarian working as a butcher. Bas Plaisier, general secretary of the Netherland’s Protestant church said Hendrikse treats Christianity “as a dogma that can be put out with the rubbish.”

She said, however, that the denomination will not discipline the pastor: “What we as a church, church board and synod can do now above all, is to give personal witness of our faith.”

A tradition I observe this time of the year is re-reading a book by Howard Fast, My Glorious Brothers, which is a fictionalized account of the Second Century B.C. Maccabean revolt in Israel, celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Last week Harrison posted on Christopher Hitchens’ latest anti-religion screed bemoaning Hanukkah and the 30 year Jewish resistance against Greek tyranny for its rejection of Greek “rationality” and indirectly giving birth to Christianity, which Hitchens deems equally “irrational”.

But is Greek “rationality” all that it is cracked up to be? (more…)

A couple of weeks ago, Dinesh D’Souza took on atheist (or anti-theist, as he likes to call himself) Christopher Hitchens in a debate moderated by our own Marvin Olasky (you can see it here). And today, Al Mohler, in a commentary about D’Souza’s book What’s So Great About Christianity, describes D’Souza’s best argument for what’s driving men like Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris to publicly lash out against God:
(more…)

I went from atheist to believer to Christian between the ages of 16 and 29. I became a Christian in a Presbyterian church, and the resulting combination of Reformed theology and new faith made me want to set straight everyone who was not a Calvinist. I made sure to bring up the baptism of our children around my wife’s grandmother, a Baptist. I read lots of dour texts. I congratulated myself on my righteous theological precision.

I confess that I recoil from such people now — not only zealous predestination-obsessed Calvinists but all theology-besotted wagon-fixers. Perhaps this is simply projection — I see now the unkindness that was in my heart in those early years, and assume that it lurks in the hearts of some people I encounter today, in blogs and through email and sometimes in the flesh. I think I detect a stridency and smugness lingering in the throats of some who labor so strenuously to point out the errors of others. We are to speak the truth, always, but in love, no? We are to be salt, yes, but also light, remember? Perhaps it was only me who needed to be reminded of that. But maybe some others among us need to hear it, too.

The thing that gets me about the vituperation some Christians aim at the likes of Christopher Hitchens and other outspoken atheists is — and this may surprise you, given my opening brief against theology-as-fetish — well, the bad theology of it all. By grace we are saved through faith, that no man may boast. None of us has pulled himself up to salvation by dint of his intellectual or moral bootstraps. Dead in trespasses and sins, no man sees the truth.

To lord it over people who don’t share our faith, then, or to look down on them as if our exalted position has something to do with our own superiority, seems not only unkind and anti-Christian, but rooted in a misperception about the origins of faith. Christopher Hitchens is better educated than most people I know, and more articulate, and more thoughtful. But he is lost in a land of unfaith, a stranger and alien to God, and no amount of reasoning or debating will bring him into the kingdom of heaven.

We Christians, on the other hand, will gain entrance through no wisdom of our own. It’s a humbling thought, isn’t it, to know that we are saved in spite of — certainly not because of — ourselves? To know that some people with superior intelligence and reasoning capacity will not be saved? It seems that our attitudes ought to reflect this reality. We ought to proclaim the truth, yes, but in humility rather than smugness.

I had lunch a few months ago with an elderly man who was instrumental in my early theological education. When I first joined the Church he gave me scores of books from his imposing library, and fielded my questions about the Bible, and Calvinism, and the Reformation. He has imposing eyebrows, and a gruff manner, and is fond of that verse about how we are worms in the sight of God. He is the quintessential reformed American Christian. It had been years since we’d last broken bread together. I asked him what God has been teaching him, expecting an answer about holiness, or righteousness, or the importance of daily prayer (he spends over an hour a day on his knees). But he looked at me, his eyes welling up, and said, “God is teaching me that nothing I do — not one thing — is worthy. But He loves me anyway.”

I wonder what might be accomplished, were we Christians more inclined to confess our own sins than to point out the sins of others. Not to ignore wickedness in the world, but to start with the wickedness that dwells in our own hearts — to say: See? I am just like you, but I have been forgiven. To say: Let me help you with that burden, brother. To say: Here is a water that quenches all thirst.

Atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of the bestselling God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, showed once again on Thursday night, Oct. 11, that he takes no prisoners. At Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., he debated Alister McGrath, Oxford professor of historical theology and author of Christianity’s Dangerous Idea.

Hitchens highlights: Christ’s atonement for sins was an immoral act, God is a sinister dictator, Christian repentance is masochistic, humans are little more than quasi-chimpanzees, and Christianity is similar to Marxism and Nazism.

McGrath politely attempted to counter Hitchens’ attacks on Christianity one by one, finally asserting that God is not a “celestial dictator” but a “celestial liberator.” McGrath’s generous eye contact and Oxford reserve, pitted against Hitchens’ well-rehearsed vitriol, did not induce a standing ovation from the Georgetown crowd, but he did raise thought-provoking questions, including: “In a world where reason and science do not deliver what we once thought they did, on what can we base our lives if we are to know what we are truly living for the good, the beautiful, and the true life?”

The King’s College, New York City, is sponsoring on Oct. 22 a debate between Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza, author of What’s So Right About Christianity.