I’m just reading through “The Twilight of Atheism” by Alister McGrath. It’s a very good book – I’m only 3/4 of the way through it, but I would definitely recommend it! One thing which he said that I found very interesting is that protestantism indirectly created circumstances in which atheism was able to thrive. I thought this was strange at first, but it actually makes a lot of sense:
One of the things which early protestantism did was to remove the focus on images and so on (not without reason – images can lead to idolatry, i.e. the focus being on the created rather than the creator). What became the focus instead was the pulpit – people would learn about God through the word. Churches became places where you would go to hear the word, and there would be nothing there to distract you from that (no statues, paintings, etc – the walls would be whitewashed). In doing so, protestantism inadvertantly turned Christianity into a dry set of doctrines which people would accept cerebrally – but take the “experience” of God out of the equation. McGrath calls this the “imaginative failure of protestantism”. Before, in the medieval ages, God was just an ordinary part of everyone’s lives – people would see the divine in everything. Not without reason the protestant movement sought to reduce that to what we could know about God through the Bible, what was taught at Church…. it just seemed that in doing so this contributed to taking the experience of God out of people’s every day lives.
In other words, it turned people into pragmatic atheists – living as though God did not exist. From this, it was a short step to actually becoming ‘proper’ atheists – people not believing in God at all.
At this point McGrath mentioned the global pentecostal movement: this movement focuses a lot on the experience of God, rather than dry preaching. It’s gained enormous popularity over the world, partially because of its ability to mould itself to fit in with cultural circumstances.
Now, I don’t know whether protestantism in general has made our experience too ‘dry’, or whether we’ve taken the experience of God out of the equation. I suspect my answer to those questions would be “maybe” and “I don’t think so”, but it’s difficult to tell. What may be one person’s experience of God may not be the same as another’s.
However I think it’s definitely worth thinking about… I can’t pretend to know what the right answer to this is at the moment, but I do believe that this is a serious issue and one which is worth thinking about at length. If we’re doing something wrong, surely we should do something about it!
Note: I don’t think that the protestant church of the present necessarily is repeating the same mistakes as the protestant church of the past. But a lot of what McGrath said seemed to ring true for me, to a certain degree. I think it’s still an issue, even if it’s not as big an issue as it was…
On this day..
- The Weekend - 2005
- No updates for Three Days! Shock! Horror!! - 2003
July 25th, 2007 at 09:06
Hmm, that’s an interesting idea. On the one hand I might suggest that the way society has developed it wouldn’t have matter whether protestantism happened or not, but then again if you look at countries that are predominantly catholic today you can see that the churches are well-attended and quite alive, in contrast to many (but certainly not all) protestant churches in the UK. One of the worst things you can do as a believer is let your faith become ordinary and mundane, just a part of life that you put on and put off like a coat. God calls us to be passionate and active, and from what I’ve seen it’s often the more pentecostal style communities that encourage this the most. Of course, then you have to get the right balance between experiencial and intellectual faith – head knowledge without action is useless, and spiritualism without teaching is dangerous.
Which leaves us with that unanswerable question – which denomination is right? I’d probably go with “none of them” and “all of them”, which kind of contradict each other, but kind of not. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses, and I don’t think it would be right to assume that you can get everything from just one church – I personally can quite easily see myself in the future flitting between Anglican and Baptist churches, receiving different things in different ways from each, and giving to each in different ways too.
November 2nd, 2008 at 04:49
…I’ve heard that there is no such thing as atheism, but rather that so called ‘atheists’ are in fact simply “weak agnostics” since a total lack of faith/belief is inherantly self-destructive and cannot be carried into the present across generations as strongly as the notion of atheism has…