The lover of life

The thought of death and life after death is ambivalent. It can deflect us from this life, with its pleasures and pains. It can make life here a transition, a step on the way to another life beyond -- and by doing so it can make this life empty and void. It can draw love from this life and deflect it to a life hereafter, spreading resignation in "this vale of tears." The thought of death and a life after death can lead to fatalism and apathy, so that we only live life here half-heartedly, or just endure it and "get through." The thought of a life after death can cheat us of the happiness and the pain of this life, so that we squander its treasures, selling them off cheap to heaven. In that respect it is better to live every day as if death didn’t exist, better to love life here and now as unreservedly as if death really were "the finish." The notion that this life is no more than a preparation for a life beyond, is the theory of a refusal to live, and a religious fraud. It is inconsistent with the living God, who is "a lover of life." In that sense it is religious atheism.

Jürgen Moltmann

The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology

A humility list

Martin Marty, the prolific Lutheran scholar at the University of Chicago, reported in The Christian Century magazine that readers have asked him when he planned to comment on the media's discovery of 'the New Atheism.' He put together a list of advice, 'to myself and anyone else who cares,' including the following:

• Keep cool. America has seen cycles like these before and has managed to survive. 
• Send cards of thanks. These authors bring up differences in an age of indifference. 
• Don't sneer. Many of these authors sneer. Where does that get us?
• Don't sound triumphalist. Some say 'we' have 'them' outnumbered 97 to three. If true, that represents a comfort margin for believers, but what does it prove?
• Don't argue. No one wins arguments - which are determined by one's knowing the answer - about the existence or nonexistence of God, but everyone can profit from a conversation that tries to pose good questions and respond to them.
• Read better books by these authors, from which you might learn something, as opposed to their sensational polemics on a subject they are not well versed in.
• Agree with the authors that in the name of religion horrible things have been done and are being done, but point out that that's not the whole story of religion. Criticism of religion from within is more searching and matters more.
• Hold up the mirror if you are a believer, and ask whether anything anyone is saying or doing gives legitimate grounds for anti-religion to voice itself and creates a market for books like these. 

Martin Marty, in Atheism Redux, published in Christian Century, July 24, 2007, quoted in Philip Yancey's Vanishing Grace, pages 42/43

Death and the believer

Lots of atheists seem to be certain, recently, that this ought not to be a problem for believers, because – curl of lip – we all believe we’re going to be whisked away to a magic kingdom in the sky instead. Facing the prospect of annihilation squarely is the exclusive achievement of – preen – the brave unbeliever. But I don’t know many actual Christians (as opposed to the conjectural idiots of atheist fantasy) who feel this way, or anything like it. Death’s reality is a given of human experience, for anyone old enough to have shaken off adolescent delusions of immortality. There it is, the black water, not to be cancelled by declarations, by storytelling, of any kind. Whatever sense belief makes of death, it has to incorporate its self-evident reality, not deny it. And again, in my experience, belief makes the problem harder, not easier. Because there death is, real for us as it is for everyone else, and yet (as with every other outrage of the cruel world) we also have to fit it together somehow with the intermittently felt, constantly transmitted assurance that we are loved. I don’t mean to suggest that all believers are in a state of continual anguish about this, but it is a very rare believer who has not had to come to a reckoning with the contradiction involved. On the one hand, the cruel world – the world made cruel by seeing it as created – and on the other one, the sensation of being cherished by its creator.

From Unapologetic, by Francis Spufford. 

Richly inclusive and non-dogmatic

[Marilynne Robinson] makes an atheist reader like myself capable of identifying with the sense of a fallen world that is filled with pain and sadness but also suffused with divine grace. Robinson is a Calvinist, but her spiritual sensibility is richly inclusive and non-dogmatic. There’s little talk about sin or damnation in her writing, but a lot about forgiveness and tolerance and kindness. Hers is the sort of Christianity, I suppose, that Christ could probably get behind. I’ll never share her way of seeing and thinking about the world and our place in it, but her writing has shown me the value and beauty of these perspectives.

from:

THE FIRST CHURCH OF MARILYNNE ROBINSON

by Mark O'Connell

Alan Roxburgh

Why this Western infatuation with the Dalai Lama? For [Andy] Lemey [writing in Macleans] it’s because the Dalai Lama’s persona solves a specifically Western problem. He puts it this way: In the 19th century the shared religious values that once permeated civilization began a ‘long withdrawing roar’... Any religion one adopts now is merely one possibility among many, a reality that drains each of its explanatory value and force. An infatuation with the Dalai Lama is the Goldilocks solution for a culture that finds its traditional religion too hot and atheism too cold. His exoticism marks him as authentic, and subjecting his teaching to critical scrutiny is beside the point, as there is never any chance we are going to engage his teachings seriously enough to be challenged by them. We instead want to bask in his distant spiritual glow.

Alan Roxburgh, in a blog post, 29.11.09 on the Roxburgh Missional Network.