I live in a world of functional atheists
and operative “echthrosists.”
What is the latter you ask? In a moment.
The secular world has no functional place
for God. Not even a “god of the gaps” is needed any longer in our
superabundantly technologized world, though before technology set in with a
vengeance the late eighteenth century French Philosophes were already
celebrating God’s absence.
The Western secular world however,
thankfully, imbibed deeply from the Gospels that every human has an inherent
right and dignity, and consequently there must be no more victims. True, there
is significant distortion of this profoundly biblically rooted doctrine. As has
been pointed out by some, the new Western cogito (metonymy for
Descartes’ famous formula) is: “I am a victim, therefore I am,” and
political correctness runs at times amok in our culture. All cultural truths
have their ineluctable detracting corollaries.
So the Western
secular world thinks it can somehow embrace neighbour and victim without
reference to God. This is unsustainable philosophically as has been pointed out
repeatedly. (In the end, why bother, without God?) And the bank from which
otherwise is drawn in the West such wonderful capital of “love thy neighbour”
and “do unto others” is of course God-soaked Scripture. (A classic statement of
this is The Atlantic Monthly article (December, 1989, Volume 264, Number 6; pages 69-85), “Can We Be Good Without God?”[1])
But Western
Christians cannot remotely be smug about secularists’ impossible functional
atheism. For we are largely operative echthrosists. What’s that, you
say?
An atheist is one who denies [the
existence of] God, from the Greek meaning literally “without God.” In my
linguistic word play, an echthrosist is one who denies [right of
existence to] enemies, from the Greek meaning “without enemy.”
The enemy in the New Testament is extreme
test case of neighbour: what assesses the pluck of our vaunted neighbour
love, which Jesus said, in turn, assays the mettle of our exalted God-talk.
When asked for the Greatest Command, he gave two for the price of one, implying
the first is predicated upon, and nonexistent without, the second (Matt.
22:40). And in case we missed the implication of Jesus, the rest of the New
Testament telescopes The Two Greatest into One, “Love your neighbour as
yourself (Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; James 2:8).” Though Christians for two
millennia have hidden behind the “God-of-violence” escape theory of the Old
Testament, Jesus says God’s entire revelation to the ancient Hebrews is
ethically summed up in two simple dictums: Love God, Love neighbour. Not
much room for a God of violence in either!
For Christians, the heat is on. Since not
only have Christians for two thousand years endlessly tried to dodge this
“two-for-the-price-of-one” deal from Jesus, and the “one-law-for-all” metonymy
of the New Testament, they categorically toss out the window any reference to
love of enemies. (C.S. Lewis’ essay, “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” The Weight of Glory
and Other Addresses, edited by Walter Hooper, (Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York,
1949, pp. 33 – 53), is representative example of excising “love of enemies”
from “dominical sayings” to consider.) Like their
secular counterparts, functional atheists (whatever their protested belief
in God), the vast majority of Christians are operative echthrosists
(whatever their protested belief in God, Christ and Scripture) when push
comes to shove, as it invariably does, in response to domestic and
international enemies. (Lewis wrote his infamous essay in support of Britain at
war.)
Put differently, while John 3:16 for two thousand
years by Christians has been the most loved and quoted text of the Bible, it
has also been the most heavily footnoted with exception clauses. After “world,”
“whosoever,” “perish,” and “everlasting life” (in the beloved King James
Version), the vast majority of Christians from Augustine (and before!) to Billy
Graham, and in turn the huge preponderance of modern-day self-designated
“Keepers of the Book” – “Evangelicals,” have inserted “except our enemies,” and
even further, “and they must die,” and “and they can go to hell!” after
“perish” and “everlasting life.” Additionally, they have tended to relegate
this verse and all biblical revelation to an ethereal other-worldly, spiritual,
no-earthly-good application that denies legitimacy to politics or universal
application to “neighbour/enemy” as surely as it does substance to Incarnation.
When I consider “secular humanists” (to use
the popular vilifying expression of Evangelicals), or “fundamentalist
Christians” (to use the popular vilifying expression of secular humanists) I
see a mirror-image phenomenon that denies frontally New Testament witness: they
assert, together, no God, no enemies; both of which in the end merge
into one and the same.
Hence my claim: I live in the secular world
amongst functional atheists. I live in the Christian world amongst operative echthrosists.
And I? Too much of the Pharisee in me for my own
good! So I will leave my observations at that before I hear again Jesus’ words,
“Woe to you! (Matthew 23).”
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/religion/goodgod.htm