An Atheist Reads Theology...?

In response to my essay on The Book of Job, my father's pastor suggested I read Walter Brueggemann's An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible. I blazed through its 176 pages in fascination and amazement. While not having been converted, I had been exposed to an extremely important facet of the Judeo-Christian god's personality that has been utterly forgotten by Christianity.

Brueggemann writes, "Israel is clear, moreover, that such angry and insistent protests addressed to YHWH are not acts of unfaith, as they are often thought to be in quietistic Christian piety, but are a vigorous act of freedom and responsibility." (Forgive me, I have since given this book to my father's pastor, and thus I do not have the page numbers). Wow. This actually vindicates what I said about Job and his friends, and helps to understand why God responded to Eliphaz in the end as he did*. Also, it is worth pointing out that that as Abraham and God are venturing to Sodom with the intention of nuking it, Abraham pleads multiple times that if there are but fifty righteous people to be found there, would God spare it [Gen 16:22-32]?

Of course, it is true that this is not the only interesting thing to be found in Bueggemann's book, but to me it is the most pressing because of how profound it is juxtaposed with how most Christians look at God and themselves.

The question to which I am drawn after reading this book is how could such an important thing be forgotten? There is an enormous discrepancy between the woman who told me that Job shouldn't complain, and Brueggemann's work. There are a multitude of possible factors, and I will try to clarify some of the directions I'm considering as I ponder this question.

The first thing I considered was the rise of the Catholic Church, but as immediately obvious this answer is (such a profoundly democratic view jettisoned in favor of absolute conformity and the pursuit of consolidated political power), we must also consider the fact that this idea did not resurface during the Reformation. It could be argued that in the beginning, the denominations that arose immediately out of the Reformation were as totalitarian and stifling as the Catholic Church itself.

The second answer is Christian anti-Semitism, and this makes as much sense as it does for Christians to be anti-Semitic in the first place. But a few steps down from that is indifference: An utter lack of communication between Christians and Jews, which is kind of funny, in a terribly dark and misanthropic way. The problem is--and Brueggemann touches upon this himself in the book--that Jews don't read Christian theology. I wonder if Christians read Jewish theology--oh wait I know they don't or this problem wouldn't exist. Christians tend to take the New Testament for granted, and read the OT in the context of the NT, which really doesn't make much sense from a literary standpoint, as it was written long before Jesus.

The truth is, God is not the evil tyrant fundamentalists and atheists make him out to be, and human beings are not helpless ants in his gaze. It's quite sad to see that most Christians do behave as Job's friends behave, and it's quite interesting that that kind of complacency is boring even to God. If Brueggemann is to be believed, God wants us to challenge him as much as he challenges us.

While Brueggemann failed to convert me (as Dostoevsky did before him), I find this engagement extremely valuable. While my own philosophy was often shafted in the book (due to the author's own disposition, which was to be expected because I am not his immediate audience), he certainly said some things I could get behind, even as an atheist; supporting such things as egalitarianism and environmentalism. After reading this book, I think it is absolutely possible for our two camps to cooperate, in spite of our differences on The Big Question.

Before I end this essay, there is one other thing that Brueggemann pointed out that I find a bit startling: "That is, YHWH did not create the world where there was nothing. rather YHWH so ordered the 'preexistent material substratum,' which was wild, disordered, destructive, and chaotic, to make possible an ordered, reliable place of peacableness and viability." This is a big deal. A lot of Christians, at least in my experience (because I pay so much attention to cases like Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and the idiocy in the Creationism/Evolution conflict), the religious often simply say that God created matter, when this is not the case. The point I'm trying to make is that neither religion nor science has yet solved the problem of the appearance of matter. In fact, the way the story goes is very much in line with what we know about the formation of planets, and especially the formation of the Earth into a habitable environment.

Above, I stated that Bruegemann had failed to convert me. Based upon my previous essay ("Why I Could Never Be Religious Again"), he should have assuaged some of my points--which he had--and I should be a believer. But there is one major hitch, which was hidden in my deconstruction of Pascal's Wager: The Bible is a book. There is nothing in it or outside of it that leads me to believe that God actually exists, nor do I see any compelling evidence in my daily life or in my studies of politics, philosophy, science, or history that leads me to believe that this god or any other actually exists. But this is absolutely not to say that I do not like these gods. Simply because I do not believe that they exist does not eliminate my respect or appreciation for them. I would say that it is for the same reason that we still turn to Greek mythology. I am simply reading The Bible in the same way, and this may actually bring forth better understanding and appreciation than the other interpretations of The Bible I have encountered.

*God had said to Eliphaz, "My anger is kindled against you, for you have not spoken of me as Job has done".