Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, reviewed Philip Pullman's new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ in The Guardian Review, 3 April 2010. I have mentioned this new book before but still not read it! Here are a couple of quotes from the review:
Pullman's Jesus is scathing about "smartarse priests" who talk about God's absence really being his presence. Well, yes: Christians use this kind of language. But not to let themselves off lightly; they're arguing that you only get anywhere near the truth when all the easy things to say about God are dismantled - so that your image of God is no longer just a big projection of your self-centred wish-fulfillment fantasies.
They (Francis of Assisi, Bonhoeffer, Romero) have seen through the surface froth of religion and heard the voice Pullman himself obviously finds so compelling. That should make us pause before deciding that the New Testament is quite as successful in sanitising an uncomfortable history through religiously convenient truth as Pullman implies. It is aware of its own temptations. It trains its readers in self-questioning.
The late Ed Kessler, lecturing about parables at the Urban Theology Unit , captured the point of the parable of the Wheat and the Tares in unforgettable fashion. He formed his fingers into a gun and pointed at his own temple. He said, 'I'm going to shoot the tares.'
You remember the story of the landowner, who finds tares are growing with his wheat? His servants ask whether they should pull up the tares. As any fool knows, this would pull up the wheat too.
It seems, as I read atheist critiques of Christianity, they are enthusiastic tare removers. I agree with 99% of what they're saying and yet ... and yet I'm always left with the feeling they have missed the point.
Of course we should question what religious people say. The world is full of people who want power and try to get it through claiming a hotline to God. But if you consistently deny the existence of all gods (as atheists do and the first Christians did), what are you left with?
Atheists claim nothing. They need to take a long hard look at what they mean by nothing. I suspect nothing is their god.
And what do Christians who reject all gods find? How do you speak of something where if you speak of it, you misrepresent it? For it to be real, we have to deny the reality of the nothing we find ...
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