The email said meet at the Albuquerque Press Club at 5. The Press Club is a log and stone mansion on a hill overlooking the freeway. Back in August, in went there to see an old friend while he is passing through town. I don’t see him much these days because he is now a philosophy professor down in Texas.
That was last August, and although the conversation was brief (the part I would share publicly, anyway) it continues to reverberate. I’ve known Stephen since we were teenagers and he always manages to say something “oracular” which gets me thinking. (Of course, oracles aren’t to be trusted: “A great empire will fall”, says the oracle, but doesn’t tell you which empire: yours or the enemy.)
This time I asked Stephen about Ludwig Feuerbach. You have to understand: we are both preacher’s kids and have read a lot of theology. Stephen even made Kierkegaard the subject of his doctoral thesis. Now, however, neither of us can read traditional theology any more. The self-deception, the sacrifice of intellect to some pointless standard of orthodoxy is too painful: at least when reading pre-existential or non-ironic writers.
I dropped Feuerbach’s name as a way of suggesting a bridge between old ways of thinking about religion and our current situation. Stephen made a number of remarks, which might seem to you to be total non-sequiturs. To explain, or rather, expound each one (because I can’t ever pretend to know what Stephen really means when he says these things) would take an essay, or in the current vernacular, a longish blog post. Here’s a sample of coming attractions:
“Wasn’t it you who told me: one must pass through the firey brook?”
“Don’t we all agree these days that Truth is dead?”
“These days I only like to read and teach Japanese Haiku.”
First I should mention, though, what I mean by “current situation”. Internet fora of various kinds can reveal trends in religion in America, most of which are extremely disappointing to the thinking person.
There is the conservative “Christian” fascist tripe, about which the less said the better. While my interest in religion is almost entirely political (I am a lawyer by trade, not an academic or clergy-person) the obviously reactionary form of right-wing religious politics doesn’t deserve much thought. Not much thought goes into it. You know it when you see it, you knock it down, kick it in the face and laugh at it. Better to just avoid it.
On the other hand, the modern “atheist” trend isn’t much better, though there’s at least some hope for intellectual growth there. We won’t be getting it from the heroes of the movement, writers like Richard Dawkins. He makes it pretty clear (in the first few chapters of The God Delusion, for example) that he is aware that liberal Christianity exists and just doesn’t care. And this is understandable, since liberal Christians aren’t mounting any political challenge to the very existence of Dawkin’s chosen profession: evolutionary biology. One also gets the impression, however, that Dawkin’s idea of “religion” is forever fixed in his upbringing as a conservative Anglican. He can’t be bother with, say, a Tillich-style systematic theology of God as “ultimate concern”, because to him a religion without an anthropomorphic God dispensing punishment and reward through supernatural miracles just isn’t worthy of the name “religion” of “Christianity”.
Young people who make posts on reddit’s “atheism” subreddit (using “young” here not in the sense of age, but as a synonym for “someone without a professional/institutional axe to grind” or simply “one who’s intellectual curiosity remains”) could possibly benefit from my sketchbook.
I say “sketchbook” because I survey the state of Christianity in Western Civilization much like the ruins of Rome from its period of decline and depopulation in the Early Middle Ages. Artists and architects have, ever since, been sketching the ruins. While Rome was never fully abandoned, and went through a rebuilding and re-decoration in the Renaissance, the form of the ancient temples and circuses became somewhat of a mystery after their functions ceased. Reviving worship of the pagan gods might be a fantasy entertained by a gentleman sketching the ruins in the 19th Century, but seriously, what one seeks to evoke is “the grandeur of Rome” as shown in the form and line of concrete and marble. Likewise, the intellectual decline of Christianity since the age of Revolutions left the religion in a similar state of decline. I view cultural artifacts like the doctrine of the Trinity in similar manner: like a pile of rubble and columns that was once a temple to Castor and Pollux. We can appreciate them in their outline but not as living institutions.
Sketching the Ruins 