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Towards a constructive dialogue between Christianity and atheism, with reference tothe work of Eeberhard Jüngel, David Bentley Hart, and Henri de Lubac
Williams, Andrew
Awarding institution:King's College London
Download date: 17. Jul. 2022
TOWARDS A CONSTRUCTIVE
DIALOGUE BETWEEN
CHRISTIANITY AND ATHEISM,
WITH REFERENCE TO THE WORK
OF EBERHARD JÜNGEL,
DAVID BENTLEY HART,
AND HENRI DE LUBAC
ANDREW WILLIAMS
A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE
DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
DEPARTMENT OF THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
FACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES
KING’S COLLEGE LONDON
1st April 2021
i
ABSTRACT
In this thesis I examine the nature of atheism and its appearance within Western thought
and culture and argue that atheist-Christian dialogue is not only possible but also that it is
desirable and important. I highlight the groundwork and parameters that enable a
constructive dialogue between atheism and Christianity to be developed and set out the
reasons why such a dialogue is necessary within society today. This is done by identifying
those aspects of both atheism and Christianity in respect of which unbelievers and believers
can learn from each other, highlighting the resources within atheism and Christianity that
may offer starting points for dialogue, and pointing to the arenas within which atheists and
Christians can come into conversation and partnership. I focus entirely on Western
atheism, the phases in its development, the connections that have existed, and continue to
do so, between theism and atheism, and the variety of different types of atheistic thought
that exist within Western culture today. I explore some of the reasons for atheism and
unbelief and address the range of different expressions of atheism by presenting a four-
fold typology of atheism. As a means to explore the different categories of atheism and as
a starting point for developing a dialogue between atheism and Christianity, I draw on three
Christian theologians who have given atheism serious attention and woven its study into
their projects. These are Eberhard Jüngel (Lutheran), David Bentley Hart (Orthodox), and
Henri de Lubac (Roman Catholic). I examine the critiques that they have offered of a range
of atheist positions and provide an analysis of their views, particularly as they relate to
atheism. I show how they each, in different ways, highlight how a conversation between
the Church and atheism can be advanced in a constructive, productive, and meaningful
way.
Drawing on the work of these theologians, I argue that a meaningful and positive
relationship between Christianity and atheism can be developed, which enables those who
both possess and deny the reality of faith in God to engage with and learn from each other.
This enables me to demonstrate how the relationship between Christianity and atheism
need not always be a polarised and hostile one, marked by confrontation, rancour, and
dispute. By examining the resources offered by Jüngel, Hart, and de Lubac, I identify a
series of approaches that enable a constructive dialogue between atheism and Christianity
to be advanced. I also argue that there is much learning that Christianity can derive from
ii
atheistic positions, that atheists can offer a prophetic function for the health of the Church,
and that there are theological perspectives that enable Christians to understand atheism and
atheists in positive ways, as well as for atheists to better appreciate the position of
Christians. Based on this premise, I seek to elucidate the elements that comprise a
productive conversation between Christianity and atheism, and explore what the mission
of the Church in increasingly secular Western societies might involve.
iii
DEDICATION
This thesis is dedicated to my family, in gratitude for the enormous support and patience
they have demonstrated to me throughout the course of this project. They include my
parents John and Margaret, together with my wife Sarah, and my children Rosaleen and
Joseph.
iv
DECLARATION
I, Andrew Williams, hereby declare that this thesis has been composed by myself, that
this thesis is a result of my own research, and that no part of this thesis has been
submitted to any other university for a degree or qualification.
1st April 2021
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am enormously grateful to my principal supervisor, Doctor Susannah Ticciati, who has
steered me through the process of writing and revising this thesis. Her insights, advice and
constructive feedback have been immensely helpful throughout the project. In addition, I
am very thankful for the support and assistance of my second supervisor, Professor Vernon
White, who offered many invaluable suggestions relating to the content and form of the
thesis during its composition. I would also like to record my gratitude to the King’s College
Theological Trust, which provide financial assistance during the early years of the project.
vi
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................... i
DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iii
DECLARATION ............................................................................................................... iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ v
Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1
1. Requiem aeternam Deo ................................................................................................ 1
2. Atheist-Christian dialogue ............................................................................................ 4
2.1 The importance of dialogue ............................................................................... 4
2.2 Dialogue in a historical context ........................................................................... 5
2.3 Advancing dialogue between atheists and Christians ....................................... 8
2.3.1 The parasitic relationship between atheism and Christianity ........................... 9
2.3.2 Believing without belonging .......................................................................... 10
2.3.3 Atheism within Christianity ........................................................................... 11
2.3.4 Conceptions of God ........................................................................................ 12
2.3.5 The nature of religion ..................................................................................... 14
2.3.6 Atheism’s prophetic function ......................................................................... 16
3. The interlocutors examined in this thesis .................................................................. 18
Chapter 1: Christianity and the age of atheism ................................................................. 22
1.1 What is atheism? ........................................................................................................ 22
1.2 The emergence of modern atheism ............................................................................ 25
1.3 The challenge to the Church ...................................................................................... 31
1.4 Reasons for atheism and unbelief .............................................................................. 34
vii
1.5 Classifying atheist positions ...................................................................................... 37
1.6 Type I atheism ........................................................................................................... 41
1.6.1 The intellectual roots of Type I atheism ..................................................... 42
1.6.2 The Enlightenment and its aftermath .......................................................... 46
1.6.3 The affirmation of reason in recent forms of atheism................................. 50
1.7 Type II atheism .......................................................................................................... 58
1.7.1 The origin and nature of Type II atheism ................................................... 59
1.7.2 The ‘masters of suspicion’ .......................................................................... 64
1.8 Type III atheism ......................................................................................................... 71
1.8.1 A contested religious inheritance ................................................................ 73
1.8.2 A secular age? ............................................................................................. 74
1.9 Type IV atheism......................................................................................................... 80
1.9.1 Radical atheism in contemporary philosophy ............................................. 85
1.10 Concluding remarks .................................................................................................. 92
Chapter 2: Perspectives on atheism in the theology of Eberhard Jüngel .......................... 96
2.1 Restoring the ‘thinkability’ of God ............................................................................ 96
2.1.1 Jüngel’s theology of the cross ..................................................................... 98
2.1.2 The God who comes into the world .......................................................... 100
2.2 Metaphysical theism as the harbinger of atheism .................................................... 102
2.2.1 The inaccessible perfection of God........................................................... 102
2.2.2 Cartesian epistemology and the erosion of God’s necessity ..................... 103
2.3 The emergence of the idea that God is dead ............................................................ 108
2.3.1 Kant’s conception of the unknown God ................................................... 109
2.3.2 The impossibility of conceiving God in Fichte’s thought ........................ 110
viii
2.3.3 Feuerbach and the anthropological essence of faith ................................. 112
2.3.4 Nietzsche and the death of God ................................................................ 114
2.4 Thinking through the death of God.......................................................................... 116
2.4.1 The meaning of the statement ................................................................... 117
2.4.2 Luther’s notion of the crucified God ........................................................ 118
2.4.3 Hegel’s contribution to the debate ............................................................ 120
2.4.4 ‘We live without God:’ Bonhoeffer and the loss of faith ......................... 123
2.4.5 Jüngel’s theology of atheism .................................................................... 125
2.5 Jüngel’s endeavour to renew Christian theology ..................................................... 126
2.5.1 Jüngel’s interaction with atheism.............................................................. 127
2.5.2 Jüngel’s doctrine of God ........................................................................... 131
2.5.3 The suffering of God and persons ............................................................. 132
2.6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 135
Chapter 3: David Bentley Hart’s engagement with atheism ........................................... 137
3.1 Theology in dialogue with unbelief ......................................................................... 137
3.1.1 Hart’s project ............................................................................................ 138
3.2 Hart’s doctrine of God ............................................................................................. 139
3.2.1 The beauty and infinity of God ................................................................. 139
3.2.2 The analogical interval and human participation in God .......................... 142
3.2.3 Divine impassibility .................................................................................. 145
3.2.4 Hart’s eschatology .................................................................................... 150
3.3 Postmodern philosophy and theology ...................................................................... 152
3.3.1 Engagements with Nietzsche .................................................................... 154
3.3.2 The rhetoric of violence ............................................................................ 157
ix
3.4 Encounters with atheism .......................................................................................... 159
3.4.1 Hart’s critique of contemporary Western culture ..................................... 161
3.5 An assessment of Hart’s work ................................................................................. 168
3.6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 174
Chapter 4: Henri de Lubac’s response to atheism and unbelief...................................... 176
4.1 The Christian vision in the context of unbelief........................................................ 176
4.2 The relationship between nature and grace.............................................................. 179
4.2.1 Opposition to neoscholasticism ................................................................ 179
4.2.2 The desire for God and the supernatural finality of humanity .................. 185
4.3 Engagements with atheism and unbelief ................................................................. 187
4.3.1 The roots of atheism and secularism ......................................................... 187
4.3.2 The consequences of atheist humanism .................................................... 192
4.3.3 Mysticism and human reason in the context of faith ................................ 200
4.4 De Lubac’s soteriology ............................................................................................ 204
4.4.1 The dignity of the person and the unity of humanity ................................ 206
4.4.2 The Church as the means for salvation ..................................................... 208
4.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 212
Chapter 5: Christianity and atheism in dialogue ............................................................. 215
5.1 Towards a constructive dialogue between atheism and Christianity ....................... 217
5.2 Resources for dialogue in the theology of Jüngel, Hart and de Lubac .................... 218
5.2.1 Eberhard Jüngel’s perspectives on atheism .................................................. 219
5.2.2 David Bentley Hart’s contribution to Christian-atheist dialogue ................. 224
5.2.3 Henri de Lubac: A Catholic response to atheist humanism ......................... 229
5.3 Engaging with different categories of atheism ......................................................... 235
x
5.3.1 Type I atheism........................................................................................... 236
5.3.2 Type II atheism ......................................................................................... 237
5.3.3 Type III atheism ........................................................................................ 238
5.3.4 Type IV atheism ........................................................................................ 238
5.4 Approaches to dialogue ........................................................................................... 239
5.4.1 The relationship between faith and reason ................................................... 242
5.4.2 The question of transcendence ..................................................................... 244
5.4.3 Christian ministry in an age of unbelief .................................................... 246
5.4.4 Patient listening ......................................................................................... 247
5.4.5 Partnership and collaboration ................................................................... 248
5.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 250
Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 255
1
Introduction
1. Requiem aeternam Deo
I know the rather sinister figure of the ‘atheist’ very well, not only from books, but also
because it lurks somewhere inside me too.1
The true believers know that they run the risk, they have to run the risk, of being radical
atheists.2
Christianity contains a germ of tranquil atheism…3
Here are priests: but although they are mine enemies, pass them quietly and with sleeping
swords… my blood is related to theirs; and I want withal to see my blood honoured in
theirs.4
The genuine, single and deepest theme of all world history and human history, to which all
the rest are subordinate, remains the conflict of unbelief and belief.5
The human relationship with faith and unbelief, the intricate connection between them, and
the insights that each can offer to the other constitute central strands in the human religious
quest, in Western philosophy and in the cultural history of our society. These are highly
complex and subtly interwoven dimensions of our identity, which have undergone a
1 Karl Barth, "Atheism, For and Against," in Fragments Grave and Gay, ed. Martin Rumscheidt (London:
Collins, 1971), 45-46. 2 Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (London: Routledge, 2005),
46. This is part of a response by Jacques Derrida to a question posed by John Caputo. 3 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum,
2003), 125. 4 F.W. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. T. Common (Ware:
Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 88. 5 Quotation attributed to Goethe. Cited in Laurence Lampert, "Nietzsche's Challenge to Philosophy in the
Thought of Leo Strauss," The Review of Metaphysics 58, no. 3 (2005): 591.
2
profound transformation over the course of human history. Of particular significance are
the changes in religious alignment and affiliation that have taken place over the last half a
millennium. During the 500 years or so leading up to the present day the populations of
the Western world have shifted from near ubiquitous belief in God and a connection with
the Church to a widespread distancing from, and sometimes opposition to, Christianity. A
momentous transformation has taken place in modern history that has seen post-religious
societies appear in the once-Christian West.6 During the last few centuries, particularly in
recent decades, the hold on thought and public life by religion has gradually eroded, and
some observers have suggested that we have reached a point where we now inhabit a
‘secular age.’7 The term should not be taken to imply that unbelief is ubiquitous within
contemporary society. Recent surveys in the United Kingdom indicate that the most
commonly used form of self-identification for individuals is ‘no religion’ rather than
atheist.8 The absence of a religious commitment does not necessarily imply unbelief.
Given the diminished role that the Christian faith has within the lives of many people
in the West, it is timely to reflect on the significance of various forms of unbelief for the
Church, and to consider how it might best engage with the phenomena of atheism and
unbelief. This is a matter that in my personal and ministerial experiences, as a former
university chaplain, as a self-supporting priest within the Church of England, as a trainer
of teachers in Religious Education, and as a member of a Standing Advisory Council for
Religious Education, I am acutely aware of and consider to be an important matter both
personally and professionally in the context of the mission of the contemporary Church.
The relationship between Christianity and atheism, together with the imperative to
develop a constructive dialogue between them, represent pressing concerns both for those
who affirm and those who reject the possibility of faith in God, and it is an issue that
requires in-depth analysis and reflection. Such an investigation must attend to the deep
6 Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (London: William Collins, 2019), 1. 7 See, for example, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1-16. 8 A NatCen survey in September 2017 indicated that some 53% of the population of the United Kingdom
now identify themselves has having ‘no religion.’ See The Guardian, 4th September 2017:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/04/half-uk-population-has-no-religion-british-social-
attitudes-survey [accessed: 9th November 2017].
3
connections that exist between Christian belief and its denial as it is encountered in
multiple ways in society today. This is because no analysis of faith’s rejection can take
place without a consideration of the engagement between Christian thought and the many
expressions of unbelief that exist today. Indeed, given the parasitic relationship between
belief and unbelief, the dialectic between faith and its rejection exposes a profound
interlinking between Christian theology and atheism. The task for Christian theology is,
then, to understand the nature and development of the different species of unbelief, to
unravel the interlaced categories of faith and unbelief and to consider how the Church can
speak into the spaces vacated by its retreat within society. This will involve developing the
groundwork and setting out the parameters for a constructive dialogue with atheism and
atheists in order to create a space in which Christians can listen carefully to the perspectives
of those who reject the existence of God and vice versa. I also believe that Christians need
to better understand the reasons why atheists have come to the position that they hold, learn
from the criticism levelled at them and the Church by atheists, and identify areas where
conversation, mutual engagement, partnership, and cooperation can be enabled.
Such a dialogue will not always be easy to facilitate and there will continue to be both
atheists and Christians who are unwilling to engage with each other. It is, however, a
desirable objective if atheists and Christians are to better understand perspectives and
beliefs that differ, often radically, from their own. Furthermore, in contemporary Western
societies, where religious identity is so contested and complicated, moving beyond the
acrimony, stereotypes, and prejudices that sometimes characterise both the views atheists
hold about Christians, and the opinions some Christians may have concerning atheists, will
be an important outcome of constructive dialogue and provide a contribution to the
building of a more united culture where people across a wide spectrum of belief positions
are able to live together harmoniously.
4
2. Atheist-Christian dialogue
2.1 The importance of dialogue
By focusing on Christianity’s engagement with atheism, specifically within the West, I aim
in this thesis to highlight the importance of and the opportunities for a constructive
dialogue between Christianity and atheism. Indeed, constructive dialogue between atheists
and Christians is enormously important in diverse Western societies today for a number of
reasons.
Firstly, earnest, patient, and respectful conversations between unbelievers and believers
can serve as a means for each group to learn from the other. It is undoubtedly important
that religious believers, specifically Christians, and atheists develop an improved
understanding of each other. In part, this process will involve the identification of areas of
common ground between the two groups, including the residual expressions of faith and
the religious currents that may remain within atheism, and the moments of doubt and
uncertainty that sometimes coexist with the faith of those who profess to be Christians.9 At
the heart of this process I believe that there needs to be charitable engagement between
atheists and Christians that involves each group respecting the position of the other.10
Secondly, dialogue can highlight how, within the history of Christianity, the seeds of
unbelief have been sown by intellectual and theological developments within Christianity
itself. This is a theme that each of the interlocutors who will be examined in this thesis are
acutely aware of. Thirdly, and closely related to the first point, in exposing the intimate
relationship between unbelief and belief, the binary distinction between atheism and
Christianity may be brought into question. Finally, constructive dialogue between atheists
and Christians can contribute to the development of a more cohesive society in which the
opportunities for partnership, cooperation, and collaboration between those who do and do
9 For a fascinating discussion of this matter, see Chapter 1 (The ‘atheism’ of Christianity) in Stephen
Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2013), 1-23. 10 Trent Horn, Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity (San Diego,
CA: Catholic Answers Press, 2013), 7.
5
not hold a belief in God can be identified in order to advance social justice and human
well-being.11
2.2 Dialogue in a historical context
Interestingly, as Stephen Bullivant acknowledges, dialogue with unbelievers is less often
practised or reported than ecumenical or interreligious dialogue.12 However, given that
atheists make up the fourth most numerous grouping across the world in relation to
religious identity (behind Christians, Muslims and Hindus),13 there remains an important
impetus for Christians to engage in dialogue with atheists in order to open up fruitful,
constructive and respectful channels of conversation from which each party can learn from
the other. This, of course, is not a straightforward task given the many different kinds of
atheist (for example, humanists, Marxists, existentialists, atheist scientists, those who hold
no interest in religion or faith, philosophical atheists, and so on) and also because there are
many atheists (as well as Christians) who are disinclined to enter into dialogue with those
who have sharply different perspectives on the question of God’s existence.
Despite the challenges in developing a constructive engagement between atheists and
Christians, there is a long history of atheist-Christian dialogue, recorded both in works of
fiction and through actual encounters. The emergence of such conversations is documented
in some detail by Stephen Bullivant in his work Faith and Unbelief.14 This account begins
with reference to the lengthy free exchange of ideas between Ivan and his novice monk
brother Alyosha in Chapter 2 of Dostoevsky’s 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov as well
as to other examples in literature, including Georg Büchner’s play of 1835, Danton’s
Death, and in Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel, Fathers and Sons. With the growth of unbelief
11 In additional to the points made in this section, Stephen Bullivant provides an extended rationale and
account of how dialogue between atheists and Christians has and may continue to be developed in
Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief, 95-118. 12 Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief, 96. 13 See Phil Zuckerman, "Atheism: Contemporary Numbers and Patterns," in The Cambridge Companion to
Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 47-65. 14 See Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief, 100-06.
6
in the twentieth century, particularly in its Marxist, humanist and existentialist forms,
grassroots dialogue between Christians and atheists became increasingly common. This
was particularly the case in France as Christians and Marxists engaged in exchanges of
views and in the ‘priest-worker’ initiative that saw Catholic (mainly Jesuit and Dominican)
priests working alongside miners, dockers and factory workers. There was also an
important encounter in 1948 when the Dominicans of Latour-Maubourg invited the atheist
philosopher Albert Camus to share his views on Christianity. This event highlighted the
necessity of honest disagreement but demonstrated that it could take place within the
context of constructive and patient engagement.
Further developments within the Roman Catholic Church took place in the aftermath of
the Second Vatican Council through the establishment by Pope Paul VI of the Secretariat
for Non-believers. This was set up in order to promote understanding and dialogue with
atheists and as an initiative it was warmly welcomed by the Director of the American
Humanist Association, who expressed his support for the Secretariat in a letter to its
President, Cardinal König. The development precipitated a number of high-profile,
international events, notably a series of international conferences that focused on Christian-
Marxist dialogue.15 Alas, after much fruitful dialogue between Christians and atheists, the
momentum in these exchanges rather dissipated and in 1993 the Secretariat was
amalgamated by Pope John Paul II into the Pontifical Council for Culture.16 With the rise
of the New Atheist movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, which reflected
a deepening sense of unbelief within the West, other opportunities for dialogue and
encounter arose. An example of this were the public conversations that the former
Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, had with prominent atheists such as Richard
Dawkins and Philip Pullman, as well as many examples of grassroots and low-key
dialogues between Christians and atheists in settings such as meeting halls, church halls
and university chaplaincies.17 In a key study, it became apparent that non-atheist students
who engaged with atheists in university settings were more likely to appreciate atheists
15 Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief, 103-04. 16 Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief, 105. 17 Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief, 105-06.
7
than those believers who did not have meaningful interactions with atheists, an insight that
once more highlights the value of conversation, listening, and dialogue.18
Although both public and lower key encounters between Christians and atheists will
often highlight areas of contention and disagreement between the two parties, it is also the
case that such initiatives may also yield many benefits and are undoubtedly worth pursuing.
There are a number of reasons why a dialogue between Christianity and atheism needs to
be developed. Firstly, honest, respectful, and meaningful conversations between Christians
and atheists can help to correct misplaced stereotypes, prejudices, and caricatures that each
group may have of the other and, in so doing, promote a more positive assessment of those
whose views about God and God’s existence are very different from those held by each
side. Secondly, fruitful dialogue can shed light on aspects of belief that are present within
the atheist (or humanist) worldview and on the beliefs, particularly those that are critiqued
by atheists, that may be rejected by those who identify as Christians. This aspect of atheist-
Christian dialogue may therefore highlight the common ground between those with and
without a belief in God. Thirdly, atheist-Christian dialogue can play a valuable role in
informing Christians’ and atheists’ views of themselves and thus underline how each group
is seen by the other. Richard Dawkins’ and Sam Harris’ understanding of the crucifixion
as a repellent doctrine serves as an example.19 Atheist-Christian dialogue in this sense can
offer an opportunity for the Church to carefully examine its own beliefs, consider how
these are communicated within contemporary society and encourage a form of self-
criticism that may enable it to engage more productively with the wider population within
which it is situated. Although dialogue between atheists and Christians will not be an easy
or straightforward task and will inevitably generate areas of disagreement and dissent, it is
certainly an exercise that is worth the effort involved, and can yield rich and rewarding
insights for both atheists and Christians.
18 Nicholas A. Bowman et al., "College Students' Appreciative Attitudes Toward Atheists," Research in
Higher Education 58, no. 1 (2017): 98-118. 19 See the citations in Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief, 113.
8
2.3 Advancing dialogue between atheists and Christians
Drawing on the work of the interlocutors who will be examined in the central chapters of
this thesis, the central objective of this thesis is to highlight how a meaningful and creative
dialogue with some manifestations of unbelief can be advanced. One of my foci is the close
relationship between belief and unbelief in the history of Western thought and how the
deconstruction of the binary distinction between atheism and Christianity can be an
important step in paving the way for a fruitful dialogue between atheists and Christians.
As the document Humanae Personae Dignitatem, issued by the Vatican’s Secretariat for
Unbelievers in August 1968, notes, ‘dialogue with unbelievers can lead believers… to a
better understanding of religious matters.’20 This might be by challenging certain views
of God, which may be untenable, idolatrous or distorting; by tempering tendencies to use
theological language in a way that is over-confident or excessively ‘clear;’ in reminding
believers that affirmations about divinity are always simultaneously accompanied by forms
of denial; and by demonstrating that transcendence can be conceived of in multiple ways,
which include phenomena and experiences that are encountered in the midst of this world.
Within this thesis I offer a number of reflections that seek to open up lines of enquiry
which may encourage honest engagement with the deep currents of unbelief in our society,
which retain a perspective that is rooted within a resolutely Christian framework, and
which offer to the Church elements of an agenda for interaction, dialogue and mutual
learning with those who have deep-seated misgivings about the Christian faith. Most
importantly, I will seek to examine the question of what the Church might learn from
atheism and how, in response, it might productively and generously enter into dialogue
with different forms of unbelief. This will involve several different dimensions of learning,
each of which may be of considerable value for Christian theology and which may
contribute to the establishment of what Paul Ricœur has called ‘a postreligious faith or a
faith for a postreligious age.’21 In the following sub-sections, I highlight a number of
20 Austin Flannery, Vatican, Council II: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents (Collegeville,
Indiana: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 1002. 21 Paul Ricœur, "Religion, Atheism, and Faith," in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics,
ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 440.
9
themes that may serve as valuable starting points for atheist-Christian dialogue, all of
which point both to the close entanglement between belief and unbelief and to the learning
that atheists and Christians can derive from each other’s position.
2.3.1 The parasitic relationship between atheism and Christianity
The first area of learning for both Christians and atheists in relation to contemporary
unbelief concerns the recognition of the close entanglement of Christianity and atheism. In
other words, there appear to be religious currents running through some forms of atheism.
Merleau-Ponty argues that atheism ‘contains within itself the theology which it combats.’22
This is an issue that has been explored at some length by both John Gray and Terry
Eagleton. Gray argues that atheists have looked for surrogates for the God they have cast
aside, that the progress of humanity has replaced belief in divine providence, and that the
notion that humanity realises common goals throughout history is merely a secular avatar
of the religious idea of redemption. Furthermore, the modern liberalism that is embraced
by many atheists is, in fact, a late flower of Judaism and Christianity.23 Thus, for Gray,
atheism rejects the idea of a creator-god but this is not the same thing as the rejection of
religion, as religion is an attempt to find meaning in the world, not a theory to explain the
universe.24 Although an atheist himself, Gray finds little to commend in New Atheism and
reserves his most interesting comments for other expressions of atheism. Secular
humanists, for example, are characterised, despite having rejected monotheistic beliefs, as
being wedded to monotheistic ways of thinking. The idea of human progress (meliorism),
which is so central to post-Enlightenment humanism is, Gray believes, merely a reworking
of the Christian idea of salvation history and even Marxism is a distorted form of
Platonism. Similarly, despite his implacable opposition to Christianity, Gray sees even in
Nietzsche an incurably Christian thinker who was never fully able to shake off Christian
values.25 This insight echoes the analysis of Nietzsche with which de Lubac concludes his
22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Evanston, Illinois: University Press, 1963), 43. 23 John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism (London: Penguin Books, 2019), 1. 24 Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, 2-3. 25 Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, 24-52.
10
work The Drama of Atheism, where he presents Nietzsche as a mystic and seeks to establish
a connection between two of Nietzsche’s key notions: the Eternal Return and the
Overman.26 Further to these observations, Gray identifies in some forms of atheism,
particularly in the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer, Benedict Spinoza and Leve Shestov, a
mystical quality that he describes as the atheism of silence.27 In reviewing Gray’s work,
Eagleton agrees with Gray’s analysis, particularly of humanists, who have, despite their
atheism, merely substituted humanity for God and remain in thrall to the very religious
faith that they claim they reject.28
2.3.2 Believing without belonging
It should also be noted that there are many people in contemporary Western societies with
a highly ambiguous relationship to religion and who may exhibit what Grace Davie refers
to as ‘believing without belonging’ or practise some form of ‘vicarious religion’ where,
despite not holding a faith, they are able to support the role of those who do to offer prayer
and worship on their behalf.29 Furthermore, a sizeable proportion of the population, whilst
distancing themselves from institutional religious movements, may identify as ‘spiritual
but not religious.’ Indeed, the contemporary interest in spirituality and ritual in Western
societies is a notable feature of culture today.30 An openness to the spiritual, or a sense of
the sacred, may provide an arena where religious and non-religious outlooks might find
26 Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, trans. Edith M. Riley, Anne Englund Nash, and Mark
Sebanc (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 469-509. 27 Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, 142-56. 28 Terry Eagleton, "Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray review – is every atheist an inverted believer?,"
The Guardian (11th April 2018). 29 Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Wiley-Blackwell, 1994). 30 For a thoughtful discussion of this aspect of contemporary society, see Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality: A
Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Barry Stephenson, Ritual: A Very Short
Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
11
some common ground,31 whilst a case has even been made for a form of ‘atheist
spirituality.’32
2.3.3 Atheism within Christianity
As well as discerning the religious provenance of atheistic thought, its ongoing openness
to the transcendent and the religious dynamics with which it is sometimes imbued, it should
also be acknowledged that there are atheistic currents within Christianity.33 This may, as
Rowan Williams has pointed out, involve the rejection of certain concepts about God that
are at odds with orthodox Christian thought, the far from uncommon phenomenon of
‘belonging without believing’ in some church congregations, and even the tensions in the
Bible that promote atheism34 as a counter to the authoritarian metaphysical theism imposed
by clerical exegesis.35 Furthermore, as Stephen Bullivant points out, there are forms of
atheism that are present within mainstream, orthodox Christian spirituality and mystical
theology: the intellectual ‘atheism’ of the via negativa, and the experiential ‘atheism’ of
the mystic’s feeling of God’s absence and/or abandonment.36 Additionally, many
Christians will acknowledge the role of doubt in shaping their beliefs and will not
necessarily be uncomfortable with its presence in their life of faith.37
31 John Cottingham, "The spiritual and the sacred: Prospects for convergence between religious and non-
religious outlooks," in Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide, ed. Anthony Carroll and Richard Norman
(New York: Routledge, 2016), 130-39; see also Paul Avis, A Church Drawing Near: Spirituality and
Mission in a Post-Christian Culture (London: T & T Clark International, 2003), 103-08. 32 Kerry S. Walters, Atheism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2010), 157-77. 33 For an extended discussion of this notion, see Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the
Exodus and the Kingdom, New ed. ed. (London: Verso, 2009). 34 For a discussion of atheism in the Bible, see Marshall Davis, Thank God for Atheists: What Christians
can learn from the New Atheists (New Hampshire: Independently published, 2017), 29-39. 35 See Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. 36 Stephen Bullivant, "Christian Spirituality and Atheism," in The Bloomsbury Guide to Christian
Spirituality, ed. Richard Woods and Peter Tyler (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 375-76. 37 For a discussion of the place of doubt within the lives of Christians, see Lesslie Newbigin, Proper
Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans Pub.
Co, 1995); Anthony C. Thiselton, Doubt, Faith, and Certainty (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017).
12
2.3.4 Conceptions of God
Another field within which atheism can provoke fresh thinking in Christian theology is in
connection with the doctrine of God. With the exception of the New Atheists, whose
thought will be discussed in Chapter 1, most atheists generally reject the concept of God
as a being and this position should not, according to Rudolf Bultmann, be indicted. In this
sense, atheism will act as a vital corrective to misconceptions about God that may be
harboured by Christians. As Gleason notes:
Curiously enough, the atheist is often a great help to the believer, unintentionally
cooperating in the necessary purification of faith by providing the salt that prevents the
believer’s idea of God from becoming corrupt.38
Rudolf Bultmann argues that a good deal of Christian discourse is overburdened by
mythological narratives, such as the idea that God is a being, that need to be pruned away
in order to allow the true message of Christ to be heard in our contemporary world.39 This
insight echoes Blondel’s assessment, referred to in Chapter 4, that the atheistic rejection of
false conceptions of God, in fact, unwittingly gives honour to God. Atheism can therefore,
as Jacques Maritain asserts, be a source of ‘hellish purification’ for Christians.40 The
characterisation of God as a being by Christians may have its roots in a static and a-
historical notion of God that was imported into Christianity in the ancient world but which
still lingers on in the faith of some Christians, and which may on occasions also distort
Trinitarian belief into a kind of crypto-tritheism.41 And, as will be discussed in Chapter 4,
neoscholasticism, which preserved this very view of God, was accused by de Lubac of
acting as progenitor of modern atheism.
The orthodox God of Christian belief is, as David Bentley Hart robustly argues, not a
being but being itself, or the source of all being. Christian belief is, in essence, about the
38 Robert W. Gleason, The Search for God (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), 14. 39 Rudolf Bultmann, "Protestant Theology and Atheism," The Journal of Religion 52, no. 4 (1972): 332. 40 Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason (London: G. Bles, 1953), 100. 41 Brian Wicker, "The Future of Belief," New Blackfriars (1967): 373.
13
reality of God’s presence and not about words or concepts, none of which will ever be
adequate as tools to capture in any definitive sense the reality of God’s mystery. As
Eberhard Jüngel also makes clear, the atheist is right to reject a metaphysically-conceived
God as standing outside the world. The transcendent reality of God is, rather, to be
encountered sacramentally in this world as both Rudolf Bultmann and Dietrich Bonhoeffer
affirm. Bonhoeffer writes that ‘God is beyond in the midst of life,’42 whilst Rudolf
Bultmann notes that ‘the transcendent is to be sought and can be found not above or beyond
the world, but in the midst of this world.’ This represents ‘the presence of eternity in
time.’43 In a shared notion of enchantment within the world, the atheist and the Christian
may therefore be closer to each other than either would normally allow, which, again,
confirms their close relationship. As Rudolf Bultmann argues, the non-nihilistic conscious
atheist is capable of sharing with the genuine Christian an acknowledgement of a
transcendent reality, and of seeking its presence in the world as opposed to outside it. This
may even make the term ‘atheist’ inappropriate for such thinkers.44
In relation to the doctrine of God, a further area of learning from atheism for Christians
as they contemplate God’s reality concerns the question of the existence of God. Atheists
will generally reject the existence of God and this commitment may, on first sight, seem to
be entirely at odds with Christian faith. However, Christians may have to pause before
denouncing the atheist’s stance on this matter. For a number of thinkers, including Meister
Eckhart, Simone Weil, and Paul Tillich, have argued that speaking about God as ‘existing’
can be misleading.45 Put another way, ‘it is impossible to have full knowledge when
speaking of God because having full knowledge or control would eliminate God’s
transcendence.’46 As Simone Weil puts it, ‘God does not in fact exist in the same way as
42 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Enlarged edition. ed. (London: SCM Press, 1971),
282. 43 Rudolf Bultmann, "The Idea of God and Modern Man," in Translating Theology into the Modern Age,
ed. Gerhard Ebeling and Robert W. Funk (Tübingen: Mohr, 1965), 90, 95. 44 Bultmann, "Protestant Theology and Atheism," 333. 45 Mikel Burley, "Atheisms and the purification of faith," International Journal of Philosophy and
Theology 75, no. 4 (2014): 325. 46 Christina M. Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics?: Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 225.
14
created things which form the only object of experience of our natural faculties.’47 The
atheistic notion of God’s non-existence can, Weil believes, be the source of purification
for it can help the believer to be on their guard in order to avoid the idolatry of supposing
that they are capable of conceiving of God.48 ‘Our knowledge of God suffers from
qualitative and not merely quantitative limitations and that we do not know God as God
knows God, as God most truly is, as unmediated presence to the intellect.’49
2.3.5 The nature of religion
A third area in which the Church can learn from the atheistic critique concerns the nature
of religion and role that this plays in the lives of believers as well as the chequered impact
that it has had during the history of Western culture. Given the patchy record of the Church
throughout history, Christians themselves should show due humility.50 For, as Martin
Buber knew, ‘religion can hide from us as nothing else can the face of God.’51 With respect
to the contested relationship between the Church and society, atheistic criticism is, quite
understandably, directed against religiously-motivated wars, centuries of Christian anti-
Semitism (an issue that de Lubac was especially conscious of), sexual abuse scandals and
a moral position on many issues that is at odds with the attitudes that prevail in much of
society, particularly amongst younger people. As Verhey notes:
[Secular moral] theories may challenge and judge certain claims made on the basis of
Scripture. Scripture has, after all, been used to justify racial and sexual discrimination; it
has been used to justify ‘holy wars,’ crusades, and inquisitions; it has been used to justify
47 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Gustave Thibon (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 20. 48 Weil's thought on this matter is discussed in Rowan Williams, "The necessary non-existence of God," in
Simone Weil's Philosophy of Culture : Readings Toward a Divine Humanity, ed. Richard H. Bell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 52-76. 49 Merold Westphal, "Overcoming Onto-theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith," (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2001), 8. 50 Rupert Shortt, God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity (London: Hurst & Company, 2016), 20. 51 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 18.
15
the abuse of power and the violation of the rights and integrity of others in order to pursue
what has been taken to be God’s cause.52
Criticism of religion is, of course, present in the Bible where both immorality and idolatry
are repeatedly denounced. Theologians have also been critical of the Church. Barth, for
example, reacted against the cultural Protestantism of his youth and against the conflation
of church and culture,53 Kierkegaard offered a penetrating indictment of the shallow and
self-righteous Christianity that he observed in Danish society, and Bonhoeffer sought to
advance the concept of ‘religionless Christianity.’54 However, in the history of Western
atheism, the criticism of religion is most closely associated with Nietzsche, Marx and
Freud, the so-called ‘masters of suspicion.’ Their critique is most sharply directed at the
Church and cultural manifestations of religion rather than against Christian theology. Their
indictments of religion are distinct and it would be misleading to conflate their views. In
the case of Nietzsche, religion is primarily sociological weakness seeking revenge. For
Marx it is sociological power that seeks legitimation, whilst for Freud religion is
condemned as ontological weakness seeking consolation. In examining the work of these
thinkers, Westphal believes that their atheism ‘should be taken seriously as a stimulus to
self-examination rather than refuted as an error.’55 He argues that Christians should listen
carefully and humbly to the critiques of three of the Church’s most formidable foes,
particularly in their observations about the nature of sin (hamartiology).
The purificatory function of the criticism levelled against Christianity by Nietzsche and
Freud is interpreted by Ricœur as having the potential to mediate between the stale religion
of accusation and consolation and a revived and purified tragic faith. According to Ricœur,
just as Nietzsche rejects the ‘god of morality’ who is ‘conceived as the origin and
foundation of an ethics of prohibition,’ so should the person of faith reject such a god.
Similarly, just as Freud rejects the image of God as a fatherly protector, so, Ricœur argues,
52 Allen Verhey, The Great Revival: Ethics and the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 193. 53 Kimlyn J Bender, "Karl Barth and the Question of Atheism," Theology Today 70, no. 3 (2013): 277. 54 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 280-82. 55 Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Fordham University
Press, 1999), x, 16.
16
should this picture of God be rejected by the person of faith.’56 In summary, each of the
three ‘masters of suspicion’ offer a chastening voice of criticism to the Church and the
religious belief and practice of Christians. Whilst their critiques may be difficult to hear,
they are insightful and provocative opponents of a distorted and self-indulgent form of
Christianity than can be more damaging than helpful, either to individual believers or to
those to whom they relate. In response to this critique, Christians can, however, respond to
such assaults by asserting that ‘the unconditional claim made by Christianity is not related
to the Christian Church, but to the event on which the Church is based.’57
2.3.6 Atheism’s prophetic function
The prophetic quality of the New Atheist authors, whose thought will be discussed in the
next chapter, has also been explored in some depth by Marshal Davis.58 Davis, a Baptism
minister himself, argues that the New Atheists have much to teach Christians. This is an
unusual but commendable position for a committed Christian to adopt. For Marshall, the
New Atheists highlight the value of scepticism and doubt in the journey of faith and
encourage believers to consider carefully what their faith may look like from the outside
for someone to whom it is difficult to comprehend. This may be a helpful exercise in
identifying the faults within the Christian faith. Furthermore, the New Atheists challenge
believers to take a long hard look at the object of their faith, particularly forms of idolatry,
including false images of God (such as the Freudian notion of God as an accusing father-
figure that must be appeased), to test its reality and help to underline the atheistic
dimensions of Christian faith with respect to other gods. Davis claims that even theology
can become idolatrous when it becomes overly systematised and petrified into creeds,
confessions of faith, and propositional truths. Similarly, religious experiences can be the
object of idolatry, particularly in Evangelical-charismatic and Pentecostal churches, which
56 Ricœur, "Religion, Atheism, and Faith," 446, 47, 60, 67. 57 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 41. 58 Davis, Thank God for Atheists: What Christians can learn from the New Atheists.
17
can, on occasions, place undue emphasis on signs, wonders and manifestations of the
presence of the Holy Spirit in believers’ lives.59
It may be that, in response to the New Atheists’ critique, Christians have good cause to
question the notion of a supernatural, interventionist, ruler-deity of traditional theism and
embark on the long path or reimagining God in other ways – as an experiential reality, or
as consciousness, as Truth, immanent beauty, love, or intimate presence, for example. As
Davis concludes:
We are entering an era of post-theistic spirituality. Revelation will be seen as a
combination of scientific discovery interpreted by spiritual experience… Theism must die
for God to live. Otherwise, the church will be nothing more than an empty tomb and a
whitewashed sepulchre. Theism is dead! Long live God!60
Christians may have much to learn from the New Atheists in their prophetic and
challenging role for the Church. The God that they reject will be the one that Christians
may also dismiss. An abstract God, a cosmic ‘watchmaker,’ a wish-fulfilment, a
judgemental father-figure is not the God proclaimed by Jesus Christ. The task for theology
is to rethink God in a way that counters these images and presents a picture of God as
intimate to us in our world and in our plight.61 This is the radical message of Christianity
that the Church must hold fast to and is a theme that is at the heart of Jüngel’s thought. It
is the love made manifest in Jesus, a vulnerable, defenceless love, the same love that
Christians are called to confess as the ultimate environment, ground and destiny of all
being.62 In other words, Christianity – at its centre, the story of love’s mending of wounded
hearts – forms a potent resource for making sense of our existence and the Christian vision
is that Christ is the revelation in a human life of what God is like.63 This is not the God that
corresponds to Dawkins’ ‘monster’ but the incarnate God who, as Jüngel affirms, is made
59 Davis, Thank God for Atheists: What Christians can learn from the New Atheists, 44-73. 60 Davis, Thank God for Atheists: What Christians can learn from the New Atheists, 316. 61 For a discussion of the role of New Atheism as a stimulus for theological reflection and renewal see Gary
Keogh, "Theology After New Atheism," New Blackfriars 96, no. 1066 (2015). 62 John F. Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 92. 63 Shortt, God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity, 1, 24.
18
manifest in weakness, suffering, perishability and death in the man Jesus, a vulnerable God
who is not, in any sense, detached from the chaos of natural and historical processes. The
Church does not affirm the God of Deism, an Absolute that remains eternally above the
world’s struggles in splendid isolation from the hopes, tragedies, sorrows, and struggles of
weak human beings and the larger story of cosmic and biological evolution. Such a God
would only be an accurate reflection of the New Atheists’ idea of God. However, it is
emphatically not the God of the Christian faith or the God of the Bible. In countering the
New Atheists’ reduction of the Bible to morality and demonstrating that, instead, it is about
meaning, it is this God of love for, and engagement with, humanity that the Church needs
to affirm as it enters into dialogue with contemporary atheists.
3. The interlocutors examined in this thesis
The following chapter explore aspects of the Christian theological response to unbelief by
setting out the complexity and differentiated nature of the atheist critique in the form of a
four-fold typology of unbelief. This will prepare the ground for more extended discussion
of the projects of three theologians from different ecclesial traditions who have sought to
engage with different kinds of atheistic critique and who have each offered
counterproposals in defense of the Christian gospel. These are the German Lutheran
theologian Eberhard Jüngel, the American Orthodox thinker David Bentley Hart, and the
French Jesuit writer Henri de Lubac. Although there are other thinkers in each Christian
denomination that engage with atheistic thought,64 I chose to focus on these theologians
because of the centrality of atheism and unbelief to their projects, the serious attention that
each gives to these phenomena, and the important resources that they each offer to the
Church as it seeks to engage in a constructive dialogue with atheism. I will examine the
distinctive contributions of each theologian, with the aim of drawing out lessons for the
64 These include: Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Paul Tillich,
Jacques Maritain, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Thomas J.J. Altizer, Joseph Ratzinger, Herbert
McCabe, Michael Buckley, Elizabeth Johnson, Merold Westphal, Michael Gillespie, Gavin Hyman, Alister
McGrath, Charles Taylor, John Caputo, Stuart Murray, Tina Beattie, and Stephen Bullivant.
19
Church today about how it can enter into a meaningful and fruitful conversation with
contemporary unbelief.
It will be apparent that each thinker engages with atheism in different ways and offers
critiques that are distinctive to their theological, historical and cultural contexts. Eberhard
Jüngel’s focus is on the modern scepticism about the reality of God, which he believes is
rooted in metaphysical developments within the Christian tradition, as well as with the
profound misunderstanding of the invisibility of God within the world. He engages with
the role of reason and logic in the philosophical tradition but also enters into an important
dialogue with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche in connection with Nietzsche’s
announcement of the ‘death of God.’ With respect to the typology discussed in Chapter 1,
Jüngel engages principally with Type I and Type II categories of atheism. For Jüngel, the
fundamental way of understanding the presence of God within the world is the cross of
Christ, upon which God, who is the mystery of the world, enters the perishability of the
human condition. The Christian faith, for Jüngel, is the response in thought and speech to
Jesus, who is the Crucified One, the one who makes God knowable and speakable as the
living form of God, who is identified as love. At the heart of Jüngel’s project, particularly
in his work God as the Mystery of the World, is an attempt to respond to the notion within
atheism that the God affirmed by Christianity is too detached and distant from the world
and may be seen as an abstract concept derived from philosophical reasoning instead of
from lived experience. This theme in Jüngel’s work was a key reason for selecting him as
the first interlocutor to be examined in the thesis.
David Bentley Hart, writing in very different circumstances, is also preoccupied with
the thought of Nietzsche. Furthermore, he engages with the broad current of Continental
philosophy in the wake of Nietzsche as he examines the thought of European philosophers
such as Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze,
Michel Foucault and Hans-Georg Gadamer, within which he identifies a nihilistic strand
that runs counter to the gospel. Hart also enters into dialogue with representatives of the
New Atheist movement (particularly Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins) as he
highlights the deeply flawed notions of God and the Christian faith that are to be found in
20
the works of these authors. In a recent work,65 Hart extends his critique of notions that are
antithetical to authentic Christian belief by dismantling the belief in hell and eternal
damnation. Hart’s sensitivity to the atheistic objection to ‘selective salvation’ was a
significant factor in identifying him as the second theologian to engage with in the thesis.
In relation to the typology that is presented in the next Chapter, I consider Hart to examine
each of the four categories of atheism within it.
Henri de Lubac’s interactions with atheism and unbelief are distinguished by his
concerns over the theological origins of the secular worldview, which he traces through
the neoscholastic principle of nature and grace being separated from each other. Thus, like
Jüngel, de Lubac is sensitive to the role of the Church in laying the foundations for unbelief.
Additionally, however, and in common with both Jüngel and Hart, de Lubac is also
attentive to the work of Nietzsche as he critiques the atheistic humanism that Nietzsche’s
work inaugurated within Western culture. De Lubac’s attentiveness to the role of the
Church in providing a foundation for atheism and the secularisation of contemporary
society, together with his efforts to recast the Christian message in ways that focus on a
social, rather than individual, understanding of salvation, were reasons for including him
as the final theologian to be discussed in this thesis. De Lubac’s focus is principally on
Type II atheism, particularly as this finds expression in the thought of Feuerbach and
Nietzsche.
It should also be noted that, although all three theologians are critical of atheistic
positions, they each also offer important resources to assist the Church in its dialogue
with atheism. These will be highlighted in the chapters dedicated to each thinker although
they will also be discussed in the final chapter of the thesis.
Having set out the rationale for developing a constructive dialogue between atheists
and Christians, examined some of the many areas of learning that Christians may be able
to derive from the atheistic critique, and highlighted the role of the three theologians who
65 David Bentley Hart, That All shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2019).
21
will be examined in the thesis, I turn in the next chapter to discuss in more detail the
nature and types of atheism, its emergence within Western culture, the challenge that it
presents to the Church, some of the stumbling blocks to belief that may precipitate atheist
arguments, and then go on to set out and discuss a four-fold typology of different forms
of atheism.
22
Chapter 1:
Christianity and the age of
atheism
In this chapter I examine the question of what is meant by atheism, acknowledge the
complex nature of the term, highlight the associations that exist between belief and
unbelief, trace the emergence of atheism in Western thought, and underline the challenge
that it presents to the contemporary Church. Having outlined some of the reasons that
provoke an atheistic worldview, I offer a fourfold typology of atheism. I then discuss each
of the types of atheism, reflecting on both their connections and internal variations. The
chapter lays the foundations for a more comprehensive analysis of the thought of my three
primary dialogue partners, Eberhard Jüngel, David Bentley Hart, and Henri de Lubac, in
the following three chapters.
1.1 What is atheism?
Given the variety of ways in which it has been used, the term atheism requires some
attention, for it is a word charged with a variety of meanings and connotations.66 It
originated in the Ancient Greek word ἄθεος (átheos), which means meaning ‘godless’ or,
broadly, ‘without deities.’ The prefix a- implies the lack of, rather than, necessarily,
66 There is evidence even in the Bible that the denial of God’s existence was present amongst the Hebrew
people. Psalms 14 and 53 both indicate this, with their opening words ‘Fools say in their hearts, “There is
no God.”’
23
opposition toward, belief. Atheism is today most commonly defined as a lack of belief in
God or gods, and an atheist is usually defined as someone who does not believe in Gods
or gods. Atheists will therefore normally deny the existence of God. They will assert that
God did not create human beings but that human beings created God and that, for this
reason, God is a myth.67 This simple definition may not, however, be entirely satisfactory
since atheist belief may fall along a spectrum from a strong conviction that God or gods
do not exist to a weaker position concerning the existence of God or gods, rather than being
a binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response to the question of belief in God or god.68 Conceptually,
Bullivant defines atheism today as the absence of belief in the existence of a God or gods.69
This is a capacious designation. By incorporating a range of positions where faith is absent,
it moves beyond notions of atheism that reduce it to the explicit rejection of belief. This
allows the term to be used as a description of both positive atheists,70 who have arrived at
their position after informed and principled thought (sometimes referred to as hard or
strong atheism) and so-called negative atheists,71 who may not have consciously evaluated
the matter but who are, nonetheless, marked by the absence of belief in a transcendent
reality (a position often described as agnosticism but also as soft or unconscious atheism).72
And by widening the object of unbelief to God or gods, an acknowledgement is made that
67 Ron Rhodes, Answering the Objections of Atheists, Agnostics, and Skeptics (Eugene, OR: Harvest House
Publishers, 2006), 22. 68 Bowman et al., "College Students' Appreciative Attitudes Toward Atheists," 99. 69 Stephen Bullivant, "Defining 'Atheism'," in The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, ed. Stephen Bullivant and
Michael Ruse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 70 Positive atheists (also sometimes termed explicit atheists), who can be considered to include Feuerbach,
Marx, Schopenhaur, Nietzsche, Freud, and Sartre, from the nineteenth century, and more recently figure
such as Ernest Nagel, Richard Dawkins, Michael Martin, and Daniel Dennett, each provide, in their own
distinctive way, a repudiation of God and all theistic claims. See Michael Palmer, "The Meaning of
Atheism," in Atheism for Beginners (The Lutterworth Press, 2013), 16-17. 71 See Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism," in The Presumption of Atheism and Other
Philosophical Essays on God, Freedom and Immortality (London: Pemberton, 1976), 14. 72 A distinction is sometimes made between soft, or weak, agnositicism, which says we do not know if God
exists, and hard, or strong, agnosticism, which says that cannot know if God exists. See Rhodes, Answering
the Objections of Atheists, Agnostics, and Skeptics, 24.
24
atheists will disavow all forms of theism and their associated conceptions of supernatural
being, whether this is in terms of the singular God or plural gods.73
It must also be acknowledged that belief and unbelief remain closely entangled and
complexly interwoven categories of human identity within contemporary Western society.
Thus, there are significant numbers of people who would classify themselves as, in some
sense, religious but who do not believe in God. These include secular Jews and Christian
atheists.74 Similarly, there are, perhaps surprisingly, those who identify as atheist but who
maintain some forms of spiritual belief, despite their rejection of any form of religious
allegiance.75 It has also become increasingly common for people today to identify as
spiritual but not religious.76
Another matter concerns the issue of whether atheism might be regarded as a positive
worldview in its own right. Atheism is generally thought of as negation, a denial of the
believing, belonging and behaving that accompany religious faith. On this definition it is
a position that rejects both a transcendent reality and a sacred dimension to material
existence. For this reason, many (although not all) atheists are motivated by naturalism,
the belief that the world and the properties of human nature are fundamentally natural and
not anchored in some invisible and supra-sensible realm that lies beyond the physical
domain.77 Such a stance is articulated by Bertrand Russell in his assessment of who we
essentially are. ‘Man,’ for Russell, is not to be thought of as the creation of divinity. Rather,
‘…his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, and his beliefs, are but the outcome of
73 This definition is shared broadly by Martin in his own understanding of the meaning of atheism. See
Michael Martin, "General Introduction," in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism:, ed. Michael Martin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1-2; see also Palmer, "The Meaning of Atheism," 13-18. 74 This paradoxical, but not uncommon, phenomenon is explored by Brian Mountford. Christian Atheist:
Belonging without Believing (Winchester: O Books, 2011). 75 Research undertaken by Theos, for example, uncovered the prevalence of belief in notions such as life
after death, heaven, hell, the soul and angels amongst those who identified as non-religious. See Nick
Spencer and Holly Weldin, "Post-religious Britain? The Faith of the Faithless," (London: Theos, 2012), 24-
31. 76 See, for example, Charles Lippy, "Review article: Spiritual but Not Religious: Understanding
Unchurched America by Robert C.Fuller," The Journal of Religion 84, no. 4 (2004). Conversely, there are
others who identify as ‘religious but not spiritual.’ The philosopher Julian Baggini and the artist Grayson
Perry are examples. 77 Julian Baggini, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5-7.
25
accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and
feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave…’78 However, atheism may also
be understood in terms of what it affirms rather than what it rejects. As several atheist
authors have been keen to point out, a more affirmative position seeks to articulate a vision
of atheism that highlights its positive, meaningful, and moral qualities, such as social
welfare, community justice and individual liberty.79
Although the focus of this thesis is on the opportunities and possibilities for a
constructive dialogue to be developed between Christianity and atheism, another argument
in the thesis is that theism and atheism are very closely related and that a straightforward
binary understanding of the relationship between belief and unbelief, or between
Christianity and atheism, is inaccurate. This point is evident in the history of atheism within
the West, which will be briefly outlined in the next section.
1.2 The emergence of modern atheism
This section will address some of the key landmarks in the history of atheism, particularly
within the West, and highlight the close connection that has existed, and continues to be
present, between theism and atheism. It will highlight the complex relationship that has
existed, and persists to this day, between belief and unbelief, and provide a starting point
for the fuller exploration of this principle in subsequent chapters within the thesis. The
section draws on the work of a number of authors who have examined the history of
atheism, including Michael Buckley and Gavin Hyman.
78 Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic: And Other Essays, [2nd ed]. ed. (London: Allen and Unwin,
1917), 46. 79 Baggini, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, 7-10.
26
It should be noted at the outset that first Christians were once described as atheists.80
Those, who like the martyr Polycarp (d. 156), refused to take part in the civic cult of the
empire and so subordinate their faith to political loyalty, were condemned to death as
atheists.81 The early use of the term demonstrates how atheism is always to be understood
in relation to a particular form of religious commitment, which it denies. In the succeeding
centuries, and throughout the Middle Ages, atheism remained a rare phenomenon. It was
not until the Renaissance that the term ‘atheist’ began to be used in a way that approaches
some of the current understandings of its meaning. Its first appearance in English has been
traced by Buckley to a text written by John Cheke in 1540 within a translation of Plutarch’s
On Superstition.82 Prior to this, theism was not, fundamentally, an intellectual position but
a practical orientation, an inspiration that governed the relationship between multifarious
forms of human life and the divine presence that enchanted – and was signalled within –
the natural world.83 For many, religion was the organising principle of society. The
emergence of a variety of atheistic viewpoints, which was set in motion by a complex suite
of intellectual, cultural and theological moves made during the Renaissance era, was a long
and drawn-out process. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the meaning of the
word atheism evolved to correspond to something similar to its current usage. In the late
1600s and into the 1700s, expressions of sceptical and so-called ‘free’ thought,
underpinned by growing interest in early scientific endeavours, emerged across Europe.84
80 Joseph J Walsh, "On Christian Atheism," Vigiliae Christianae (1991): 261; see also David Bentley Hart,
Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (London: Yale University Press,
2009), 126. 81 Rowan Williams, "Analysing Atheism: Unbelief and the World of Faiths," Bearing the Word (2004): 1.
See also the chapter 'Atheism Before Modernity' in Simon Perry, Atheism after Christendom: Disbelief in
an Age of Encounter (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2015), esp. 5-17; Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief, 1-2,
143. 82 Plutarch’s adoption of the term suggests that he was using it to describe the denial of divine providence,
rather than the reality of God. However, it is significant that the word was first used just as European
society was on the cusp of its long transition toward modernity. Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of
Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 9-10. 83 As Shagan notes, ‘Historians interested in the emergence of atheism have described at considerable
length the variety of meanings attached to the term in the sixteenth century, arguing that it did not generally
signify the absence of belief in God.’ Ethan H. Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment
from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 2018), 101. 84 James M. Byrne, Glory, Jest and Riddle: Religious Thought in the Enlightenment (London: SCM Press,
1996), 124-33.
27
The emergence of atheism during the Enlightenment was a highly complicated process
although it appears that its inception was closely related to birth of modernity and the desire
for an objective grasp of reality through rational enquiry and the application of scientific
methods.85 Such speculative enquiry, which pointed to the nonsensical nature of orthodox
Christian belief, seen in figures such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Voltaire and Hume, served to
loosen the grip of the Church amongst the intellectual classes.86 Even in the Enlightenment,
however, many thinkers remained wedded to a Christian worldview and faith in God, often
in the form of Deism, persisted within European intellectual culture. It was in eighteenth-
century France that the word atheist finally came to be used as a term of self-identification.
Following his somewhat tortuous journey through theism, Deism and pantheism, it was the
famous encyclopaedia creator Diderot who was to become the first explicitly and self-
confessedly atheist philosopher.87 Further propelled by the forceful thought of Diderot’s
contemporary d’Holbach, atheism quickly became a respectable position that one could
freely apply to oneself. By the middle of the century, naturalistic interpretations of the
universe, which made no recourse to theological explanations, were widely held amongst
the philosophes, who advanced the so-called ‘Cult of Reason.’ However, even when God
was denied, theistic structures were retained through the substitution of another notion,
such as Reason, Truth, or Nature, for God.
In Britain, the situation was more complex and until the end of the century, atheism was
championed, in the main, by solitary figures,88 and was not, as in France and Germany,
associated with revolutionary politics. There was, actually, resistance to atheism in Britain,
with the terms, secularist or agnostic89 (the latter coined by Thomas Huxley90), being used
85 Gavin Hyman, "Atheism in Modern History," in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael
Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27-28. 86 Alan Charles Kors, "The Age of Enlightenment," in The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, ed. Stephen
Bullivant and Michael Ruse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 195-6. 87 Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 199. 88 D. Carroll, George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (Taylor & Francis, 2013), 38, 249. Other well-known
English atheists included Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and Lord Byron (1788-1824). 89 People who identify as agnostic may neither believe or disbelieve in the existence of God. They may not
subscribe to the anti-theistic beliefs of positive atheism and may instead by regarded as a form of negative
atheist for whom the question of God simply does not arise. Palmer, "The Meaning of Atheism," 17. 90 See Thomas Henry Huxley, Agnosticism and Christianity (Editions Le Mono, 2016).
28
as alternative and more culturally acceptable labels. Beyond the learned elites, within the
working classes religious identity was frequently marked by apathy, indifference and
clerical hostility rather than intellectually-grounded unbelief.91 Sensitive observers within
the Church of English, including John Henry Newman, could read the shifts taking place
in European civilisation and they predicted that religious dissent would move from private
to public arena of corporate life.92 For a number of authors, such as Thomas Hardy and
Matthew Arnold, the loss of faith in Victorian England provoked a sense of poignant
sadness rather than triumphant optimism, as they grappled with their own complex
relationship between belief and unbelief.93 Once again, the entanglement between faith and
unbelief is evident as the erosion of belief in God was accompanied, for some at least, with
lament and wistfulness.
This sense of mourning is captured in words from Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover
Beach:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
During the twentieth century atheism became much more widespread within Western
culture and this trend has continued into the twenty-first century. Atheism underwent a
91 Walter Arnstein et al., "Recent Studies in Victorian Religion," Victorian Studies 33, no. 1 (1989): 151;
Brian Harrison, "Religion and Recreation in Nineteenth-Century England," Past & Present, no. 38 (1967):
99. 92 Hyman, "Atheism in Modern History," 32. 93 For highly insightful discussions of the religious views of these two figures, see Norman Arkans,
"Hardy's 'Religious Twilight'," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21, no. 3 (1979); Anthony
Kenny, "Newman and Victorian Doubt," New Blackfriars 92, no. 1038 (2011). See also R. Albert Mohler,
Jr., Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheists (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway Books, 2008), 23-26.
29
transition from an intellectual position to a cultural phenomenon.94 Over recent decades,
disengagement from the Church and disinterest in Christian faith has moved out of private
consciousness into the Zeitgeist of European cultural life. It was in the 1960s that atheism
first gained a firm grip within all levels of society.95 By this decade Western society had
entered what Ebeling terms the ‘age of atheism.’96 Disengagement from the Church and a
loss of Christian faith became widespread within the 1970s, especially within youth culture
and there are few signs that this is a trend that will be reversed. Despite this development,
it is still the case that more people describe themselves as ‘non-religious’ rather than
‘atheist.’97 It is also the case that a loose belief in a ‘higher power’ or ‘something out there’
persists within Western populations even amongst those people who do not have any form
of religious identity. Furthermore, there appears to be considerable interest in forms of
spirituality that have been unshackled from institutional religious structures, there has been
a resurgence of interest in religion within Continental philosophy (particularly, although
not exclusively, in French phenomenology), and prominent coverage is given to issues
related to faith and belief within the media.98 Empirical research highlights a ‘fuzzy
fidelity,’ that is a the subtle interweaving of faith, doubt and denial amongst European
people, who may exhibit non-binary religious identities.99 To demonstrate this, many
people belong exhibit what might be termed ‘believing without belonging,’ which renders
them somewhat hospitable to religious concerns even if levels of attendance and allegiance
are low.100 Given the coexistence of religious and secular phenomena in contemporary
94 It should be noted that atheism is predominantly a feature of countries that have historically been
characterised as Christian, that Western atheism is by and large a home-grown phenomenon and, for this
reason, tends to be most pointed in European nations. See Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief, 47-48. 95 Hugh McLeod, "The Religious Crisis of the 1960s," Journal of Modern European History 3, no. 2
(2005): 205. 96 Gerhard Ebeling, "The Message of God to the Age of Atheism," Oberlin College Bulletin January 1964:
3-14. 97 A NatCen survey in September 2017 indicated that some 53% of the population of the United Kingdom
now identify themselves has having ‘no religion.’ See The Guardian, 4th September 2017:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/04/half-uk-population-has-no-religion-british-social-
attitudes-survey [accessed 9th November 2017]. 98 See Matthew Engelke, "Religion and the media turn: A review essay," American Ethnologist 37, no. 2
(2010). 99 David Voas, "The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe," European Sociological Review 25, no. 2
(2009): 161. 100 Gavin Hyman, A Short History of Atheism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 17.
30
society, it would arguably be more accurate to describe the world we inhabit as ‘religio-
secular.’101 It would appear that the boundary between faith and unbelief is a permeable
one and that, as Ronald Dworkin observes, ‘the familiar stark divide between people of
religion and without religion is too crude.’102 The complicated intersection of theistic and
atheistic themes is explored in the context of several artistic projects, including the Netflix
series Stranger Things, the sculptures of Damien Hirst, and the music of David Bowie,
Nick Cave, and Leonard Cohen, in an absorbing study that develops the argument that
Christianity both needs atheism and that atheism offers profound and necessary theological
insights into Christianity itself.103 Intriguingly, it might also be argued that the interest in
various atheistic standpoints, in particular the attention given to the arguments propounded
by the so-called ‘New Atheists’ in recent years, points to the persistence of a religious
dynamic within Western nations. This suggests that a binary distinction between theism
and atheism is unsustainable and that that the dynamic flux between belief and unbelief
within the West demonstrates the interwoven nature of these perspectives, both within the
lives of individual and within the wider population.
It is also the case that religion in contemporary Western society has been far from
extinguished. The surge in Christian and Muslim populations within the Global South has
had enormous consequences for international religion and has impacted on some Western
cities with sizeable immigrant populations, particularly through the spread of
Pentecostalism.104 As a result of this, as well as the increasing popularity of Evangelical-
charismatic churches, religious affiliation and church attendance is actually growing in
some major cities, such as London.105 This trend further illustrates the complex relationship
101 Martin E. Marty, "Our Religio-Secular World," Daedalus 132, no. 3 (2003): 42. 102 Ronald Dworkin, Religion without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2. 103 Kutter Callaway and Barry Taylor, The Aesthetics of Atheism: Theology and Imagination in
Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019). 104 Scott M. Thomas, "A Globalized God: Religion's Growing Influence in International Politics," Foreign
Affairs 89, no. 6 (2010): 94. 105 John Wolffe and Bob Jackson, "Anglican Resurgence: The Church of England in London," in Church
Growth in Britain: 1980 to the Present, ed. David Goodhew (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 23-40.
31
that exists between belief and unbelief within the West and highlights how deeply
connected these two positions are in society today.
1.3 The challenge to the Church
There is little doubt that unbelief in its manifold expressions constitutes a matter of
considerable importance to the ministry and mission of contemporary churches. Whilst he
may have rather simplified and exaggerated the phenomenon, perhaps because his words
were issued when the demarcation line between theism and atheism was a little more
clearly drawn than it is today, it is significant that in 1986 Pope John Paul II identified
atheism as ‘the striking phenomenon of our time.’106 God, for many, has become
superfluous, a fading memory from our culture’s history. Having abrogated the properties
traditionally attributed to divinity and transferred them to ourselves, it has been suggested
that humanity has usurped God.107 The Israeli author, Yuval Noah Harari, in his recent
best-seller Homo Deus, captures the tenor of this new conception: ‘In seeking blessing and
immortality humans are in fact trying to upgrade themselves into gods.’108 Recalling
Feuerbach’s famous critique, which I shall examine in due course, he even suggests that
the act of faith in God is no more than confirmation that the only genuine basis for truth is
the human conscience: ‘…the real source of authority is my own feelings. So even while
saying that I believe in God, the truth is I have a much stronger belief in my own inner
voice.’109
One of the major themes running through this thesis, signalled by the quotations at the
start of the Introduction to the thesis, is the complex entanglement between Christian faith
and atheism. The relationship is a multifaceted one. Firstly, as many thinkers have
106 This was a statement within the the fifth encyclical written by Pope John Paul II. "Dominum et
Vivificantem," Section 55 (1986). 107 See C.A.J. Coady, "Playing God," in Human Enhancement, ed. Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom
(Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 55-80. 108 Yuval N. Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), 43. 109 Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 265.
32
acknowledged, atheism in Europe was generated dialectically. In other words, the
apologetic strategies adopted by Christian thinkers were to prove, it turns out, to be the
very ground for key developments in the growth of atheism within Western culture. Thus,
as Buckley, in particular, has argued, the very efforts designed to counter atheism by the
Church were the source of its intellectual power and cultural growth.110 Reflecting his
reading of Nietzsche, Valadier is more forthright: ‘it was the Christian tradition that
produced atheism as its fruit; it led to the murder of God in the consciences of men because
it presented them with an unbelievable God.’111 Secondly, both atheism and Christianity
have, at times, imagined the nature and being of God in ways that are now regarded as
unhelpful and unfaithful to the biblical witness. Thus, the different manifestations of
atheism today may be mapped to specific expressions of theism, which have arisen
throughout the history of the Church and which have each generated a particular mode of
unbelief. As Rahner remarks, ‘atheism essentially lives on the misconceived ideas of God
from which theism, in its actual historical forms, inevitably suffers.’112 Eberhard Jüngel
makes a similar point in a different way as he notes that both atheism and theology ‘stand
equally overshadowed by the dark clouds of the unthinkability of God.’113 It follows then
that certain categories and ideas about God need to be carefully unpicked for a constructive
dialogue to be opened up between theists and atheists. This may be one of the ways in
which atheist perspectives might make a contribution to the life of the Church.
If that conversation can be held, atheism might, on occasions, have an important role to
play within Christian theology. Indeed, ‘[c]ertain types of atheism… may prove both
therapeutic on behalf of theism and even positive in their ethical thrust.’114 Engagement
with atheism need not, therefore, be a combative exercise. A number of Christian thinkers
110 Michael J. Buckley, Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), xi. 111 Paul Valadier, Nietzsche: l'athee de rigueur (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1975), 485. 112 Karl Rahner, Encyclopedia of Theology: A Concise Sacramentum Mundi (A&C Black, 1975), 50-51. 113 GMW, vii, 17. 114 Joseph C. McLelland, Prometheus Rebound: The Irony of Atheism (Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 1988), 5.
33
acknowledge the potential value of such dialogue. The philosopher Paul Ricœur, for
example, observes that:
… atheism is not limited in meaning to the mere negation and destruction of religion but…
rather opens up the horizon for something else, for a type of faith that might be called… a
postreligious faith or a faith for a postreligious age.115
Ricœur is an important voice in Christianity’s response to atheism, particularly as it was
expressed by Nietzsche and Freud, seeing it a valuable resource that can mediate between
‘stale religion’ and a purified faith.116
A similar acknowledgement of the value of atheism for Christian faith has been put
forward by other authors. Barth’s endorsement of Feuerbach’s rejection of religion (for all
his reservations about the earlier author’s final conclusions), which is consonant with
Barth’s own criticism of the prevailing Protestant theology of his day, derived as it was
from Schleiermacher, is a good example of this.117 Burley holds that ‘atheism can be
positively beneficial, and perhaps even essential, in promoting a deeper mode of faith or at
least in preventing one from slipping into shallow or idolatrous modes.’118 The notion of
purification is also at the heart of Simone Weil’s heartfelt explorations of the boundary
between faith and unbelief: ‘There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the
notion of God.’119 And within his thoroughgoing examination of atheism as an
indispensable aid for religious belief, Merold Westphal even asserts that Freud, Marx and
Nietzsche are ‘God-given instruments of our own cleansing and renewal as individual
Christians’ who offer a critique of religion that echoes that voiced by the Old Testament
prophets, Jesus’ denunciation of the Pharisees, Paul’s critique of works righteousness and
115 Paul Ricœur, "Religion, atheism, and faith," in The Conflict of Interpretations : Essays in Hermeneutics
(Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 440. 116 Ricœur, "Religion, atheism, and faith," 460. 117 Barth provided an introductory essay in Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George
Eliot (New York: Harper, 1957), x-xxxii. For a helpful discussion of this relationship, see Bender, "Karl
Barth and the Question of Atheism," 272. 118 Burley, "Atheisms and the purification of faith," 320. 119 Weil, Gravity and Grace, 114.
34
James’ critique of cheap grace.120 The opportunities for fruitful interaction between
Christians and atheists will be revisited in the final chapter of this study.
1.4 Reasons for atheism and unbelief
There is little doubt that the grounds for atheism are complex and varied, and that people
will reject the reality of God’s existence for many different reasons. In this section I will
outline some of the objections to belief in God that are cited by atheists, which may also
present stumbling blocks to the participation of atheists in dialogue with Christians.121
Although the reasons for atheism I highlight are all important ones, I recognise that this
may not be an exhaustive list and that some atheists will cite other factors that have
provoked their rejection of the existence of God. Nonetheless, what follows will provide a
foundation for a typology of atheism that will be presented in the next section of this
chapter.
For some unbelievers, the basis of their atheism is grounded in their perception that God
is too distant and detached from the world, that God is solely an object of faith, and that
there is insufficient evidence to believe in God within human experience.122 This basis for
atheism is a feature of Type I atheism in the typology outlined in the next section. Such a
conception is one that Eberhard Jüngel seeks to respond to in his work God as the Mystery
of the World. It is a position may be associated with a purely materialistic or naturalistic
conception of the world and may also be wedded to a belief that scientific enquiry provides
120 Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism, 10-11. 121 Stephen Bullivant also offers a discussion of the range of reasons for disbelief in Chapter 2 of his work
Faith and Unbelief, 24-46. 122 Such a position was adopted by the poet Shelley, who in 1811 was expelled from University College,
Oxford, for having published an essay entitled “The Necessity of Atheism.” Shelley argues that, since there
is no compelling evidence for the ecistence of God, there is no intellectual obligation to believe in God. See
Alister E. McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism : The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World
(London: Rider, 2005), 122-27.
35
the only basis for both investigating and drawing conclusions about the nature of reality.123
The notion that science and atheism are intrinsically linked is widespread within some
expressions of atheism, particularly that articulated by thinkers within the New Atheist
movement, for whom religious and scientific positions are fundamentally incompatible.124
The Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is frequently cited by atheists as
evidence that the Christian conception of creatio ex nihilo is incomprehensible and
unbelievable, although it should also be noted that there are many Christians who are not
especially troubled by Darwin’s ideas about the evolution of species for which the fossil
record provides ample evidence.125 This first reason for the denial of existence of God is
essentially connected with intellectual argumentation, logic, reason, and evidence, which
are certainly characteristics of Type I atheism in the typology presented later in this
chapter.
There are other reasons for rejecting the existence of God that are founded upon
emotional or instinctive revulsion from the Christian message rather than on an intellectual
dismissal of faith. One of the arguments that sometimes emerges in atheistic rhetoric is the
notion of selective salvation and eternal damnation, which, quite understandably, can be
very off-putting to unbelievers. Both David Bentley Hart and Henri de Lubac seek to
respond to this objection in their projects. The Christian idea of hell, whilst not necessarily
part of the faith of many Christians, can be traced to several passages in the New Testament
(for example, Matthew 25.41), and has run as a thread through the Christian history. It has
presented a major stumbling block to belief for several contemporary atheists including
several members of the New Atheist movement.126 The issue of hell and eternal perdition
is certainly a contested issue in Christian theology and the objections to this notion that are
123 Naturalistic objections to the existence of God are discussed in some detail by Richard Dawkins in the
chapter ‘Why there is almost certainly no God’ in his work The God Delusion. Richard Dawkins, The God
Delusion (London: Black Swan, 2007), 137-89. 124 See, for example, D. C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (London:
Penguin Books, 2007), 29-53. 125 See Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief, 39-45. 126 See, for example, Casper Rigsby, The Passion of the Atheist: Exploring the Emotional Aspects of
Atheism (Scotts Valley, California: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), 16-18; Dawkins,
The God Delusion, 359-62; Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (London: Bantam, 2007), 4.
36
raised, quite understandably, by atheists may provoke Christians to reflect carefully on
their views about hell.
A further and very powerful reason for rejecting the existence of God, which is in part
both intellectual and emotional, stems from a protest expressed by many atheists against
arbitrary suffering within the world. It is a theme that exercises all three of the interlocutors
examined in this thesis, although Hart gives the matter the most extended treatment,
particularly in his work The Doors of the Sea, which discusses the issues raised by the
Indian Ocean tsunami of 26th December 2004. Described by Hans Küng as the ‘rock of
atheism,’127 the existence and extent of suffering certainly presents an enormous obstacle
to faith in God for those who encounter trials, pain, sorrow, and suffering, either in their
own lives or in those of people they love. It is entirely understandable that this issue should
act as a stumbling block faith and, for many, it may be an insurmountable issue that cannot
be reconciled with the existence of God. The problem of evil has provoked responses from
Christian theologians who have sought to provide a justification for God in the face of
suffering through various forms of theodicy. These arguments, however, tend to have little
persuasive power among atheists, and suffering remains a very significant factor in the
unbelief of a large proportion of atheists.128 With respect to the typology that will be
presented in the next section, the issues of suffering and hell tend to be factors that provoke
Type II atheism.
In addition to the reasons for unbelief referred to above, atheism may also be rooted in
objections to the moral failings of the Church, both in its history and within contemporary
society, in a perception that religion and violence are interwoven, and in an objection to
the perceived privileges accorded to the Church within some Western nations, particularly
(as in the United Kingdom) where the Church is formally established and where it plays a
key role in the apparatus of the state. The strong secular currents sweeping through many
European nations in the early decades of the twentieth century may have been the cause of
127 Hans Küng, On Being a Christian (London: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 2008), 432. 128 For a discussion of this issue, see Bullivant, Faith and Unbelief, 32-39; see also William L Rowe, "The
Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism," in The Philosophy of Religion Reader, ed. Chad Meister
(London: Routledge, 2008).
37
faith’s erosion in the lives of many people within their populations.129 There are also many
people who once attended churches but who have drifted away and cut ties with
Christianity. This process is most commonly found amongst teenagers and young adults.
Despite disassociating themselves from churches, however, studies of church leavers do
suggest that they frequently continue to pursue journeys of faith, even if these do not
involve church attendance.130 The loss of faith that is sometimes, although not always, a
feature of church leavers, and the objections to the place of the role of the Church within
an increasingly secular society, tend to be features of Type III atheism in the typology
outlined in the next section.
Finally, there are expressions of atheism within some forms of Continental philosophy
which stress the radically immanent nature of all human experience and which seek to
erase the transcendent dimension from human life. Associated with the workers of thinkers
such as Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Quentin Meillassoux, and Gilles Deleuze, this
philosophically-grounded form of naturalism is mainly associated with Type IV atheism
in the typology that follows.
1.5 Classifying atheist positions
As the previous sections sought to make clear, an examination of both the development of
unbelief and its contemporary expression demonstrates that atheism takes a variety of
forms and that different principles have governed its argumentative force. Atheism over
history has been derived from multiple religious, intellectual, social and cultural
influences, which accounts for the constellation of atheistic standpoints and identities
within society today. The remainder of this chapter will be dedicated to delineating and
discussing a proposed heuristic typology of atheistic perspectives. The classification
129 Gregory Starrett, "The Varieties of Secular Experience," Comparative Studies in Society and History 52,
no. 3 (2010). 130 Alan Jamieson, A Churchless Faith: Faith journeys beyond the churches (London: SPCK, 2002); Alan
Jamieson, Jenny McIntosh, and Adrienne Thompson, Church Leavers: Faith journeys five years on
(London: SPCK, 2006).
38
offered here seeks to identify four dominant strands within atheism based on the key
principle or driver that informs each type.131 The four categories, which might be best
thought of tendencies of thought or argumentation, rather than clearly delineated positions,
along with the motivating factor with which they are associated, are as follows:
Type I atheism: unbelief stemming from the application of reason.
Type II atheism: atheism associated with the rebellion against God.
Type III atheism: disengagement from belief based on indifference to religion or the
question of God’s existence, and an orientation of personal and cultural priorities that
makes no or little reference to faith.
Type IV atheism: a radicalisation of atheism resulting from a profoundly immanentist
philosophy.
Each of these species of atheism are present in some form or other within contemporary
society. In the sections that follow their current mode of expression within Western culture
will be outlined before tracing some of the key strands within their intellectual genealogies.
In doing so, it will become evident that the categories are not neatly-packed fields of
thought. There is considerable cross contamination of influences and priorities amongst
the different modes of unbelief. Thus, reason, whilst it is especially important to the first
category of atheism, will still have some role in the other expressions of unbelief. Similarly,
the repudiation of God, perhaps on ethical grounds or in the cause of human autonomy,
which is key characteristic of a rebellious Type II atheism, may also surface within the
other types. Furthermore, within each field there are significant internal variations, which
prevent any of these orientations from being treated as homogenous positions. There are,
131 It should be noted that other typologies of atheism have been developed by a range of authors. See Gray,
Seven Types of Atheism; Thomas Steven Molnar, "Theists and Atheists: A Typology of Non-belief,"
(1980); Christopher F. Silver et al., "The six types of nonbelief: a qualitative and quantitative study of type
and narrative," Mental Health, Religion & Culture 17, no. 10 (2014); Barbara Keller et al., "Profiling
atheist world views in different cultural contexts: Developmental trajectories and accounts," Psychology of
Religion and Spirituality 10, no. 3 (2018); Stephen LeDrew, "Discovering Atheism: Heterogeneity in
Trajectories to Atheist Identity and Activism," Sociology of Religion 74, no. 4 (2013).
39
nonetheless, important distinctions that need to be traced and it will become apparent that
particular forms of argumentation tend to surface more prominently than others in each of
the four spheres of atheism. It should also be noted that the tendencies associated with each
type of atheism will be differently weighted in different atheist thinkers and that few
individuals will exhibit patterns of thought that are confined to a single category of
unbelief.
Type I reason-based atheism will be examined first. Its dynamism comes from the
application of rational and empirical strategies to demonstrate the non-existence of God
and thus to promote the logic of unbelief. It is, primarily, an atheism of the head. Emerging
during the birth of modernity and intensifying within the European Enlightenment, this
variety of atheism is especially closely associated with the thought of David Hume and,
although he was not an atheist himself, Immanuel Kant. It continued through nineteenth-
century German Idealism and philosophical positivism before being taken up by certain
twentieth-century philosophers, notably Bertrand Russell.132 It then gained expression in
the state-sponsored ‘scientific atheism’ of the Soviet Union in the twentieth century and
within the shrill rhetoric of the so-called New Atheists, who came to prominence in Britain
and North America in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Type II atheism is less concerned with proving the non-existence of God than in
highlighting the social, political and psychological damage that arises when humans centre
their world on faith in God. For Type II atheists, theistic belief alienates us from our true
selves and so needs to be rejected. It is, quite distinctively, an atheism of the heart.133 The
organising principle here is more moral repulsion than intellectual argument; protest is
more significant than proposition. This Promethean form of atheism, which we shall
132 Russell’s unbelief is expressed in his lecture ‘Why I am not a Christian’ although this piece focuses
more on debunking what he sees as the dehumanising myths of Christendom rather than attacking the heart
of Christian belief. Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian: and Other Essays on Religion and Related
Subjects (London: Routledge, 2004). 133 This characteristic of the varieties of atheism we are dealing with here was identified by Jacques
Maritain: On the Church of Christ: The Person of the Church and Her Personnel, trans. Joseph W. Evans
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 261, n.22.
40
explore below, gained force in the nineteenth century following the critique marshalled by
the great masters of suspicion: Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud.
Type III atheism, whereby God and church-going lose their place at the centre of society
and in individual lives, is closely linked to the cultural process of secularisation (although
this is not necessarily an atheistic development) and to the increasing currency given to the
term humanism as a philosophical position and humanist as a form of cultural identity. It
is a category that is characterised by a weaker form of atheism than that associated with
the other three types, and an orientation that might be better described as agnosticism.134
Marked by indifference toward Christianity, alternative and generally non-faith notions of
transcendence and the decoupling of personal spiritual identity from institutional religious
frameworks, this form of unbelief became commonplace during the twentieth century and
is arguably the most common expression of atheism found today in Western societies.
Although it is certainly less forthright than the other forms of atheism considered here, it
could be thought of as an instinctive or intuitive atheism of the gut, orientated around a
lifestyle that is generally not driven by intellectual or moral argumentation, but which is
characterised, nonetheless, by disinterest in and lack of connection with religious beliefs
and values.
Finally, attention will be given to a variety of unbelief that has emerged in recent
decades that has sought to advance a radical form of atheism. Drawing on developments
in both contemporary Continental (particularly, French) and analytical philosophy, Type
IV atheism seeks to answer Nietzsche’s call for a ‘second atheism,’ one that frees itself
from theistic structures as well as its belief content and which offers a thoroughgoing
redefinition of what it must mean to disown any notion of God’s reality. The stress placed
on a radically materialistic conception of reality suggests that this deeply-rooted and far-
reaching outlook might be considered an atheism of the body. It is an atheism that
questions, and is often highly critical of, earlier expressions of imitative ‘humanistic
atheism,’ and is sometimes associated with ethical and political activism. In its more
134 Palmer, "The Meaning of Atheism," 2.
41
radical forms, it is an outlook that will deny not just the reality of divinity, salvation and
eternity but also the very desirability of belief in these things.
1.6 Type I atheism
In this section I will outline the perspectives of a number of rational expressions of atheism.
I will also consider the intriguing phenomenon termed ‘New Atheism.’ As we shall see,
the application of reason runs as a thread through these different types of atheism. Indeed,
following the Enlightenment, reason came to be regarded as the organising principle and
supreme virtue of culture, the Leitmotif of self-confident human identity. This conception
emerged only gradually as the modern age unfolded and has deep roots in periods of
intellectual history stretching back into the mediaeval period and beyond. Once
established, however, reason became crowned as the arbiter of what is true and the defining
trait modernity, the episode in intellectual culture, which Gavin Hyman defines as a ‘desire
for an all-encompassing mastery of reality by rational and/or scientific means.’135 The
authority of reason and its capacity to deliver access to universal truth has, of course, not
been unchallenged. The attack on modern rationalism launched by Rousseau, heralding the
so-called eighteenth-century ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ in France and the Sturm und Drang
(storm and stress) movement led by Hamann in Germany, and advanced by Schelling
during the following century, gave impetus to a critique of reason that reverberated in the
work of many later thinkers.136 These include Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Lévinas,
Foucault, Vattimo, members of the Frankfurt School, and a host of other postmodern
authors, all of whom have, in different ways, sought to question the positivism,
instrumentalism, materialism and determinism associated with Enlightenment thought by
highlighting the role of the body, history, language and culture as mediating components
135 Hyman, A Short History of Atheism, 11. 136 Arthur M Melzer, "The origin of the counter-enlightenment: Rousseau and the new religion of
sincerity," American Political Science Review 90, no. 2 (1996): 344; Damon Linker, "From Kant to
Schelling: Counter-Enlightenment in the name of reason," The Review of Metaphysics (2000): 338.
42
in the human quest for truth. The important relationship between some of these thinkers
and atheism will be explored in later sections.
Notwithstanding this criticism of its basic premises, modernity prizes reason as the lens
through which reality should be viewed. It has been argued that modernity’s controlling
assumption is that the individual can escape the clutches of their temporal apparatus and
‘view’ the world from a detached position of clarity and independence.137 From this
putative perspective, the methods of rational enquiry are marshalled in order to deliver
definitive judgements about what is true. This development has huge implications for the
subject of this study for it led to a form of unbelief that is most preoccupied by the issues
of evidence and logic in its denial of God, a mode of unbelief that is sometimes referred to
as speculative atheism. This position seeks to highlight the fallacious nature of religious
belief, to demonstrate that the concept of the divine is based on an unprovable hypothesis,
and attempts to point to the intellectual mistakes that underpin religious traditions.138 Yet,
the atheism that appears to be associated with the growth of modernity cannot be examined
in isolation from the belief systems that it reacts against. In other words, it can only be
understood against the backdrop of a distinctively modern theism, whose development is
interwoven with a number of epistemological moves made during the transition towards
modernity, principal amongst them being the marshalling of the resources of reason in
order to demonstrate the existence of God.
1.6.1 The intellectual roots of Type I atheism
The roots of cognitive dissent from assertion of God’s reality have been traced back, by a
number of authorities, to intellectual developments in the ancient world. However, the
received argument is that the emergence of modernity, with its turn to the subject, the
adoption of the scientific method and the attendant pursuit of objective knowledge about
the world, created the intellectual circumstances that enabled atheism to appear within
137 David H Nikkel, "The Postmodern Spirit and the Status of God," Sophia 33, no. 3 (1994): 46. 138 Bowman L Clarke, "The Modern Atheistic Tradition," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
5, no. 4 (1974): 209.
43
Western culture. As we shall see, it may be possible to excavate certain grounds for
contemporary reason-centred atheism from the history of theology. Thus, several authors
have suggested that certain moves which were made by thinkers from the medieval period
into the Enlightenment era can be construed as significant in creating the grounds for
rational rejection of faith in God.139 In the sections that follow, I will outline the genealogy
of Type I atheism as it unfolded through the modern era and into the present age. My focus
will be on identifying those theological and philosophical developments that might be
construed as having encouraged reason-centred unbelief.
A case has been made to locate the roots of modern atheism in the scholastic thought of
Thomas Aquinas who, it is suggested, opened a gulf between faith and reason.140 This
argument is most closely associated with Paul Tillich, who believes that atheism is the
inevitable outcome of Thomas’ supposed adoption of a rational way to demonstrate God’s
existence in his quinque viae.141 Such an assessment is, however, debatable and it will not
be discussed here. This is because the developments in philosophical theology, which took
place within the Church in the generations after Aquinas, are almost certainly of greater
significance for the emergence of Type I atheism. Of particular note is the major shift that
took place in the way in which God was conceived of in late mediaeval thought, which, it
has been argued, was to lay the ground for the emergence of a distinctly modern version
of theism by René Descartes (1596-1650) and his successors, and in so doing created the
conception of divinity that modern atheism was to reject.142 A number of thinkers suggest
that the key transition here was from a conception of God as spirit to the notion of God as
139 This narrative is worked out in texts such as the following: Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism;
Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth
Century (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1986); Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological
Origins of Modernity (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Hyman, "Atheism in Modern
History." 140 Glenn B Siniscalchi, "Contemporary Trends in Atheist Criticism of Thomistic Natural Theology," The
Heythrop Journal (2012): 14; for a discussion of the relationship between Thomism and atheism, see also
James V Schall, "Thomism and Atheism," New Blackfriars 92, no. 1041 (2011). 141 ‘It is obvious that [Thomas’ five proofs] bring God’s existence down to that of a stone or a star, and it
makes atheism not only possible, but unavoidable as later development has proved.’ Tillich, Theology of
Culture, 18. 142 As Simon Perry notes, Descartes inaugurated a profoun shift in the nature of belief. God was no longer a
foundation for belief, but an object of belief. Perry, Atheism after Christendom: Disbelief in an Age of
Encounter, 25.
44
a thing (sometimes equated with a ‘Supreme Being’). The importance of this development,
so it is asserted, lies in the crucial shift that took place in the understanding of divine
transcendence. Instead of transcendence being ontologically related to creaturely reality in
qualitative terms, it came to be seen, rather, as quantitatively different from us and thus
‘merely’ beyond our epistemological horizon. In other words, God became not so much
fundamentally and essentially different from the physical realm of human existence, but
infinitely greater, in quantitative terms, from the existence we partake in.143 In short, God
became ‘domesticated.’ For Gavin Hyman, following this theological move at the outset
of modernity, ‘atheism becomes almost irresistible.’144
The profound developments in Western epistemology and ontology advanced in the late
Middle Ages were to be taken forward decisively by the one figure generally thought to
represent the inauguration of theological and philosophical modernity, René Descartes.
Within a context of political upheaval and intellectual and religious turbulence, Descartes
sought to grant certainty in an era of doubt.145 His intention was to articulate a
philosophically-grounded confirmation of divine reality that would gain universal assent.
This was undertaken by a committed Christian whose key work, the Meditations on First
Philosophy, was dedicated to the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne. However, numerous
interpreters have identified the Cartesian revolution as an essentially a-theological
development, which set up an ineluctable trajectory toward modern intellectual atheism.
Indeed, one of the major interlocutors in this study, Eberhard Jüngel, centres much of his
own assessment of atheism’s roots on the cognitive strategies adopted by Descartes. It is
now widely believed, therefore, that contemporary atheism developed as a gradual
realisation of a philosophical revolution instantiated at the outset of modernity by the
methodological break enacted by Descartes.146
143 Hyman, "Atheism in Modern History," 38-39. 144 Hyman, A Short History of Atheism, 79. 145 In particular, he was responding to the widespread scepticism, which had accompanied the renewed
interest in Pyrrho and other ancient philosophers by Renaissance thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne.
See McLelland, Prometheus Rebound: The Irony of Atheism, 61. 146 Hyman, A Short History of Atheism, 19.
45
Descartes is such an important figure in the development of Type I atheism because of
the status that he grants to human reason. Underscoring the priority he gives to rational
thought over appeals to the witness of scripture, Christology or pneumatology in defence
of the Christian faith, he opens his Meditations with this remark: ‘I have always considered
that the two questions respecting God and the Soul were the chief of those that ought to be
demonstrated by philosophical rather than theological argument.’147 Reason is
characterised by Descartes as the process whereby knowledge of empirical reality could
be derived from a priori eternal truths, truths that were held in common by both the divine
and human mind. We are like God because of our use of reason. Thus, a priori speculation
can produce incontestable certainties because reason yields truths that are grounded in the
mind of God.148
The thinking self, the cogito, is, for Descartes, the foundation and first principle of
indubitable certitude in the face of radical doubt about what it is that can actually be known.
This is because Descartes calls into question the reality of the external world and believes
that, as our senses can deceive us, knowledge can only be secured through a strategy
involving the ‘painting’ of the objects in the world by the mind or consciousness (cogitatio)
of the human person.149 Descartes instead strives to demonstrate the superiority of the clear
and distinct rational thought that is associated with immediate selfhood in providing
indubitable certainty about God.150 What is crucial here is that Descartes seeks as a
Christian to employ rational philosophical logic, rather than religious experience, ecclesial
tradition or Scripture, within his quest to offer surety about God. He prohibited appeal to
unfounded divine revelation within his project.151 However, in an effort to eradicate further
doubt about the cogito itself, Descartes invokes the existence of God as the indispensable
147 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. John Cottingham and Bernard Williams, [1641]
ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Sect 1.1. 148 Byrne, Glory, Jest and Riddle: Religious Thought in the Enlightenment, 99. 149 Meditation I, Descartes, Meditations, Sect 1.6. 150 McLelland, Prometheus Rebound: The Irony of Atheism, 61. 151 Hyman, "Atheism in Modern History," 34.
46
ground of certain truth. God, then, is at the outset of modernity, essentially an idea that
stems from, rather than provides the frame for, the human ego.152
Many thinkers, both Christian and non-Christian, argue that, by positioning the cogito
at the centre of knowledge, Descartes’ break with the Christian theological tradition fuels
the development of contemporary intellectual unbelief. They claim that, in making God
the highest object of human knowledge, Descartes inadvertently ushers in an atheistic
framework. Although he invokes God, God is an alien theological concept within a de facto
secular rationalist construction.153 In Descartes’ epistemology, the thinking self, rather than
God, is the fundamental basis of certitude. The question of God becomes, for the first time,
a matter more appropriate to philosophy than theology.154 In short, rational principles
trump faith in addressing the matter of divine reality.
1.6.2 The Enlightenment and its aftermath
In the eighteenth century, France became Europe’s battleground between the established
power of the Church and the emerging secular spirit.155 The climate of the time brought
focus to the allegedly corrupt effects of ecclesial authority, with these being contrasted
unfavourably with the liberating effects of autonomous reason. The atheism of the French
Enlightenment is closely associated with thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot,156 Baron
152 Patrick Masterson, Atheism and Alienation: A Study of the Philosophical Sources of Contemporary
Atheism (Dublin: Gill and Macmillann, 1971), 8-10. 153 Hyman, A Short History of Atheism, 27. 154 Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 75. 155 Byrne, Glory, Jest and Riddle: Religious Thought in the Enlightenment, 134. 156 Like a number of other Enlightenment figures, Denis Diderot (1713-84) is mischaracterised if he is cast
as enemy of God and an icon of atheism. Rather, his revulsion was with the Church and with any notion of
received truth. Perry, Atheism after Christendom: Disbelief in an Age of Encounter, 29; Peter France,
Diderot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 37.
47
d’Holbach,157 and, ironically, the Roman Catholic priest Jean Meslier.158 They each sought
to drive a wedge between ‘blind’ faith and ‘clear’ reason. Religious belief was often cast
as something obediently unthinking, wilfully dishonest or positively stupid. Revelation
was rejected and replaced by an ‘inexorable materialism’ coupled with a focus on human
experience as the best guide to nature and life. Because Christianity could not be the true
religion, the Christian faith was, in fact, the enemy of true religion.159 This was to have a
lasting impact on European society. As Michael Buckley suggests, these figures introduced
the denial of God into the intellectual culture of the West with such strength that its
presence was permanently secured.160
The energy and force of reason within the Enlightenment are based upon a conception
of the ego as central to human identity and around which the phenomena of the world
appear as a spectacle. Some commentators have even described this position as a cult of
reason.161 Reason discloses reality, enabling the ‘science of man to take precedence over
the despotism of theology.’162 The outcome of unbelief resulted in the label ‘atheist’
becoming for the first time, in eighteenth-century France, a term that individuals were
happy to apply to themselves. The key question from the point of view of this study,
however, is whether the Church and Christian theology was attacked from the outside by
these self-confident expressions of unbelief or whether, through its own intellectual
strategies, it contributed to the atheistic critique itself. As noted, a case has been made that
the latter scenario was a key factor in the emergence of atheism. The assaults by the atheist
157 The Swiss aristocrat D’Holbach (1723-89) is widely thought to be the first unambiguously self-
professed atheist in the modern West. He ran a salon in Paris that attracted leading Enlightenment thinkers,
including Diderot, Rousseau, Adam Smith, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Benjamin Franklin. He
rejected the idea that nature was dependent on the God of Christianity and argues that matter is self-
sustaining. His fanatical deprecation of God is expressed in his most famous work, The System of Nature
(1770), within which he attacks the religion of his day with venom, intelligence and eloquence as he
displays a rather obsessive vehemence against God. Ira O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French
Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 310. 158 Meslier’s personal atheism was revealed in writing discovered only after he had died. 159 See Charles A Gliozzo, "The Philosophes and Religion: Intellectual Origins of the Dechristianization
Movement in the French Revolution," Church History 40, no. 3 (1971): esp. 274, 80. 160 Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 322. 161 Gliozzo, "The Philosophes and Religion: Intellectual Origins of the Dechristianization Movement in the
French Revolution," 273. 162 McLelland, Prometheus Rebound: The Irony of Atheism, 96.
48
philosophes, such Voltaire, d’Alembert, and d’Holbach, were made possible because the
theologians during the Enlightenment had largely abandoned the religious figure of Jesus
as the primary expression on earth of God’s reality and had instead sought to address the
question of God using the same terms and language as their detractors had done. By failing
to proclaim the ‘witness and reality of Christ and the religious experience of the Judeo-
Christian heritage, Christianity itself prepared the ground for the Enlightenment rejection
of God.’163
The epitome of Enlightenment thought might be regarded as that developed by
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant’s insight is that for speculative reason to analyse
questions such as the existence of God, the possibility and limits of human freedom, the
grounds of knowledge and the basis of morality, it has to turn on itself and provide an
analysis of its own power. In pursuing this project and in his efforts to connect Christian
faith with the surrounding culture, Kant developed a corpus of writing that has exerted
huge influence on Christian theology since 1800 such that he has, for some, taken on the
status as the ‘philosopher of Protestantism.’164 However, at the same time, he has also been
regarded as a harbinger of atheism. He proposes that, while we can know, via sensory
experience, particular facts about the world (which he termed phenomena), we cannot
know things in themselves (Dinge an sich) as they exist prior to any experience (which he
called noumena). The sharp distinction in Kant between the human mind and the objective
world places the onus within the process of knowing on the a priori forms of our
understanding. The conditions for the possibility of knowledge and the basis of universal
science and mathematical statements are thus to be located not in the empirical realm of
objects but in the categories of thought (such as causality and spatial relations) with which
the human mind encounters this world. In this way, the raw material of knowledge, that is
the given sensory data received from the world, is transformed into intelligible reality by
the activity of the thinking subject. This insight has profound implications for religious
belief.
163 Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 41. 164 Gordon E. Michalson, Kant and the Problem of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 1.
49
In elevating human sensibility and understanding within the field of epistemology, Kant
intensifies the turn to the subject inaugurated by Descartes. The thinking subject becomes
the locus of knowledge generation through the mind’s operational principles and
structures. Thus, the world as it appears to us is the product of the interaction between our
categories and the world in itself. However, for Kant, we do not have access to the world
as it exists in itself beyond the mind. For Kant, the noumenal world remains inaccessible
to us and for this reason the jurisdiction of metaphysics is severely truncated. Kant
demands empirical limitations on all theoretical knowledge and insists that no physics or
natural philosophy, no theoretical knowledge of any stamp, can form the basis for any
natural theology.165 What is left is a ‘metaphysics of finitude’ and a philosophical position
that has had an enormous impact on intellectual enquiry about God in the generations since
Kant.166 For Kant, metaphysical demonstrations of God’s existence are invalid. They serve
only to mystify and distract us from our task of establishing ourselves as agents within the
finite empirical world. Whilst he goes on to develop a moral argument for faith, based on
practical reason, it is a rather attenuated ground for religious belief. God serves the purpose
of a ‘necessary practical postulate’ who is required in order to make sense of the human
experience of morality.167 Kant's practical theory of religion is, then, that morality is not
based on religion, but rather religion follows as a practical consequence of the absolute
demands made on us by moral law.
On balance, it seems that, despite his intentions, Kant corrodes, rather than upholds, the
Christian inheritance. For this reason, he would appear to have a stronger continuity with
the nineteenth century atheism that we shall explore later in this chapter than with the
liberal theological tradition that has at times appealed to him. For these reasons, he has left
a legacy that is highly significant for atheism. Firstly, Kant’s critical philosophy heralded
the end of metaphysical theism and its God of necessary reason: 'classical theism reaches
165 Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 327. 166 Masterson, Atheism and Alienation: A Study of the Philosophical Sources of Contemporary Atheism, 14. 167 Hyman, "Atheism in Modern History," 35; see also Allen W. Wood, "Rational theology, moral faith,
and religion," in The Cambridge companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 402-3.
50
its denouement at the hand of its own child.'168 Secondly, because for Kant practical belief
may coexist with theoretical unbelief, both the autonomy of morals and the establishment
of a secular society become possible. His critique of reason yields, then, an unstable
solution to the problem of God that would soon come under attack in the work of his
successors.
1.6.3 The affirmation of reason in recent forms of atheism
In Western societies today, amongst the panoply of positions held by those who do not
identify as religious, the absence of compelling evidence for the existence of God, or,
alternatively, the presence of those conditions (such as gratuitous evil and suffering),
which, it is claimed, cannot be reconciled with the existence of God, are sometimes cited
as grounds for atheism.169 These arguments demonstrate that reason plays an important
role in persuading atheists and other sceptics that religious faith is misplaced. As we shall
see, the logic of unbelief has a long and complex history. It can be traced back into the
ancient world, although in Western civilisation its place within intellectual enquiry into the
question of God came to the fore with particular prominence at the beginning of the modern
era. In particular, current manifestations of atheism appear to hark back to the arguments
made by Voltaire, Diderot and Lessing in their desire to oppose faith and reason during the
European Enlightenment.170
Reason-based atheism in some Western nations remains an important element in
contemporary forms of unbelief. It is most closely associated with a highly visible and
much-discussed brand of atheism that surfaced in the first decade of the twentieth century.
168 McLelland, Prometheus Rebound: The Irony of Atheism, 102. 169 Although the new atheist movements tends to be regarded as a British and American phenomenon, the
French philosopher Michel Onfray and leaders of the ‘neuer Atheismus’ movement in Germany, such as
Michael Schmidt-Salomon, Philipp Möller and Andreas Müller, demonstrate how the cause of militant
atheism has been extended into continental Europe. See, for example, Jim Stone, "Evidential Atheism,"
Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 114, no. 3 (2003). 170 Another manifestation of Type I atheism is the Sovient scientific atheism that was adopted in Russia and
other states within the Soviet bloc during much of the twentieth century. See Dimitry V. Pospielovsky, A
History of Soviet Atheism in Theory and Practice, and the Believer (London: Macmillan, 1987).
51
Often referred to as ‘New Atheism,’ this phenomenon re-packages the atheism that
emerged during the Enlightenment. Associated with writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam
Harris, Daniel Dennett, Garry Wolf (who is believed to have coined the term), Victor
Stenger, Anthony Grayling, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Phillip Pullman, and Polly
Toynbee, New Atheism has taken a particularly strong hold in British and American
culture. These are very different writers who come from a range of academic disciples.
They use disparate genres of literature, are marked by distinctive approaches, and are
exercised by diverse issues in their engagement with religion and faith. It is therefore of
some interest that the label New Atheist has been applied within contemporary culture as
if to imply that these authors represent a unitary phenomenon.171 Their differences aside,
however, New Atheist writers do, in general, share the objective of articulating a somewhat
strident resistance to religion and belief. Dawkins’ denunciation of a particular image of
God illustrates their combative tone:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction:
jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty
ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal,
pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.172
Furthermore, some New Atheist authors seek to highlight the supposedly delusional nature
of faith in a non-natural dimension of reality and invoke a polemic that often caricatures
religious belief and believers as either hopelessly insouciant or dangerously deceptive.173
David Bentley Hart, who will be the focus of Chapter 3, is, for example, described by
171 Thomas Zenk, "New Atheism," in The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, ed. Stephen Bullivant and Michael
Ruse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 254-55. 172 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 51. 173 Richard Dawkins’ most recent book elaborates on his his earlier criticism of Christianity. In this work,
he dismisses the historicity of the events described in the Bible (particularly miracles) and rejects the
notion that Christianity provides a viable moral framework for human beings to live by. Richard Dawkins,
Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide (London: Bantam Press, 2019). Rupert Shortt offers a perceptive
critique of Dawkins' muddled thinking, philosophical illiteracy and the crude caricature that he has of the
Chrsitian tradition. See Rupert Shortt, Outgrowing Dawkins: God for Grown-Ups (London: SPCK, 2019).
52
Dawkins as a ‘yammering fumblewit,’ and as someone who has the ‘abysmal lack of
anything approaching wit or intelligence.’174
It is generally thought that the energetic and outspoken form of atheism found in the
works of New Atheist thinkers is a response to the Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks in the
United States on 11th September 2001 and the London bombings on 7th July 2005.175
Religion, according to the New Atheist polemic, leads to violence. Such an assertion
complicates the location of New Atheists within the Type I atheism group. For this position
is arguably more a form of anti-religious renunciation than it is a logical dismissal of faith
in God, suggesting that New Atheism may show traits of Type II, as well as Type I,
atheism. Indeed, the criticism of religion as a social phenomenon – as much as of religious
faith – is an important strand within New Atheist rhetoric. This is particularly the case
when those with conservative religious views are critiqued, because of what is judged to
be an irreconcilable chasm between fundamentalism and the logic of science:
I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it debauches the scientific enterprise. It
teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are
available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.176
Although they may recognise the diverse range of positions within any one faith tradition,
most of the New Atheist authors not only attack religious fundamentalists.177 New Atheist
writing is generally centred on a robust condemnation of what are perceived to be acts of
religiously-motivated violence. However, other contributing factors, particularly in
Britain, can also be identified. These are connected with the perceived privileges and
political influence of the established Church of England, along with the public funding
174 These comments were posted in a blog by Richard Dawkins. They are cited in Nick Spencer, Atheists:
The Origin of the Species (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 252. 175 Sam Harris began writing the first of the best-selling atheist books, The End of Faith, the day after
‘9/11.’ Stuart McAnulla, "Radical atheism and religious power: new atheist politics," Approaching
Religion, no. 1 (2012): 91. 176 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 321. 177 Even religious believers with tolerant, moderate and liberal attitudes are condemned because, it is
asserted, they provided a shield for militant religious fanatics. See Adam C. Scarfe, "On Religious
Violence and Social Darwinism in the New Atheism: Toward a Critical Panselectionism," American
Journal of Theology & Philosophy 31, no. 1 (2010): 55.
53
being directed towards Church and other faith schools. Whatever the causes, the recent
resurgence of atheism within the public square certainly demonstrates that religion
continues to be a matter of interest and attention in Western societies. Although writing
before the emergence of New Atheism, Bruce highlights this phenomenon: ‘self-conscious
atheism and agnosticism are features of religious cultures… they are postures adopted in
a world where people are keenly interested in religion.’178
The most significant feature of New Atheism, however, is the emphasis that authors in
this movement place on rational analysis and logic in marshalling their case against belief
in God. Indeed, the appeal to reason runs through much New Atheist literature. Religion is
correspondingly portrayed as intellectually naïve or even wicked and dangerous, and so
New Atheist campaigners regard religion as an attack on Enlightenment values.179
Contemporary celebrity atheists, particularly Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Amis, Grayling,
and Hitchens, champion rational thought, science and the capability of the human mind to
supposedly demonstrate the falsehood of religious belief in a way that echoes the
marshalling of reason to denounce the Christian worldview in eighteenth-century France.
Tina Beattie asserts that the New Atheists represent the culmination of the Enlightenment
triumph of reason over faith, an end-point in the trumping of religious ignorance by
scientific rationalism.180 Dawkins is especially clear about the rational basis for his atheist
views, trumpeting the power of reason to defeat what he regards as the illusion of faith.181
Such an emphasis on the power of autonomous thought betrays, Beattie suggests, New
Atheism’s Protestant preoccupation with individual faith, textual analysis and moral
concerns, in contrast to the rather different modes of atheism found elsewhere in Europe,
178 Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 58. 179 Christopher R Cotter, "Consciousness raising: The critique, agenda, and inherent precariousness of
contemporary anglophone atheism," International Journal for the Study of New Religions 2, no. 1 (2011):
88. 180 Tina Beattie, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (London: Darton
Longman & Todd, 2007), 114. 181 He even quarries the Christian tradition to justify his position by citing Martin Luther’s dismissal of
reason (‘Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes of reason.’) as evidence of the Church’s
contempt for rational thought. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 221.
54
which, reflecting their Jewish and Catholic provenance, tend to focus more on matters of
language, community and symbol.182
This focus on evidential logic in justifying their dismissal of God is generally expressed
through the lauding of science as the principal means by which humanity can know about
the world and gain access to truth. The empirical is seen as the normative domain for testing
what Dawkins refers to as the ‘God hypothesis.’183 Within the epistemological model
adopted by the New Atheists, science and religion occupy the same field and both speak
to the same reality.184 It is a move that is, conversely, associated with a degree of hostility
to the terrain upon which atheists have historically waged their battles with religion,
namely philosophy.185 References to the triumph of science are littered throughout best-
selling atheist literature and Dawkins has set up a foundation named after him, which aims
to ‘promote scientific literacy and a secular worldview.’186 Reason, within the canon of
New Atheist thought, amounts to the application of the scientific method to the task of
understanding the world and embracing human wellbeing. As the comedian Paul Provenza
put it, in addressing a rally in the United States, ‘we are here to celebrate our belief in
reason, science and the power of the human mind.’187 For the New Atheists, this logic
informs the demolition of claims made by religious believers because the presence or
otherwise of God is, they hold, reducible to a scientific hypothesis to be tested. Given the
lack of empirical evidence for God, they conclude that God cannot exist.
Although New Atheism’s intellectual provenance can be followed back into the modes
of atheism that emerged within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in
Europe, there are distinguishing features of the movement, despite a degree of internal
diversity, that give it a rather different character from earlier forms of anti-religious dissent
182 Beattie, The New Atheists, 15. 183 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 24. 184 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 50; see also William A. Stahl, "One-dimensional Rage: The Social
Epistemology of the New Atheism and Fundamentalism," in Religion and the New Atheism: A Critical
Appraisal, ed. Amarnath Amarasingam (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 99, 101. 185 Massimo Pigliucci, "New Atheism and the scientistic turn in the atheism movement," Midwest Studies
in Philosophy 37, no. 1 (2013): 151. 186 See https://www.richarddawkins.net/aboutus/ [accessed 03.01.18]. 187 See Stephen RL Clark, "Atheism Considered as a Christian Sect," Philosophy 90, no. 2 (2015): 287.
55
within the Type I category. Firstly, there is an uncompromising, pugnacious, and resolute
tenor to the New Atheists’ rhetoric, which is encapsulated by their best-known protagonist,
Richard Dawkins: ‘I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking
God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have
been or will be invented.’188 The assertive attitude to matters of faith and belief can, at
times, be belligerent.189 Using what many would hold to be a disturbing metaphor that
recalls dark episodes in European history, Dawkins describes faith as ‘one of the world’s
great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.’190 Going beyond an
understandable critique of the failure of religious individuals and institutions on moral
grounds, the New Atheists insist that religion is almost always fundamentally damaging
and corrupt. Harris is particularly strident in this regard, ridiculing religion and describing
himself as being ‘at war with faith.’191 In no uncertain terms, the religious education of
children, for example, is singled out as wilfully harmful: ‘isn’t it always a form of child
abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought
about?’192 New Atheist authors’ arguments tend to bypass the philosophical concepts and
approaches used in earlier debates about God and are expressed in a much less sober and
more brazen register. Instead of adopting academic conventions or engaging with
philosophical and theological arguments, the New Atheist style is about accessible and
popular language framed by a highly political agenda.
Secondly, taking advantage of social media, the Internet and other forms of mass
communication, the New Atheists are marked by a much higher degree of social and
political organisation than had been the case in previous expressions of atheism. There is
a collective identity to atheism today, which is centred on best-selling books, a strong
188 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 36. 189 Amarasingam has described the leading new atheists authors as ‘petulant and provocative, challenging
yet cranky, urgent but uninformed.’ "Introduction: What is the New Atheism?," in Religion and the New
Atheism: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Amarnath Amarasingam (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1; see also Lawrence
Wilde, "The antinomies of aggressive atheism," Contemporary Political Theory 9, no. 3 (2010). 190 Richard Dawkins, "Is science a religion?," The Humanist 57, no. 1 (1997): 26. 191 For his uncompromsing repudiation of Islam, for example, see Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion,
Terror, and the Future of Reason (London: Free Press, imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2006), 129. 192 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 315.
56
media presence, public audiences, marketing initiatives (such as the ‘There is probably no
God…’ message seen on the on the side of buses in London and Berlin), conventions,
activist organisations and political agitation.193
Finally, the New Atheist polemic is, ironically, coloured by a distinctly religious
character.194 It might even be claimed that much contemporary militant atheism mirrors
the traits of religious fundamentalism, the very target of its invective.195 Both seek to offer
a monopoly on truth, both exhibit a binary perspective on theological positions (by
demonising their opponents whilst regarding their own position as unambiguously correct),
both tend to be socially and politically conservative, and both have a tendency to rancour
in debates on the nature of truth.196 There are even church-like gatherings for atheists,
which operate in many cities across the world.197 These bodies hold events that have a
similar structure to Christian acts of worship and, in the case of the Sunday Assembly,
which was founded by a former member of an Evangelical church, borrow approaches
from traditional church services. The atheist meetings include songs, readings, an address,
time for sharing experiences and for socialising, which engenders a strong sense of
community and belonging.198
Even the appeal to science as the arbiter of truth has a religious ring to it. Science is
offered as the means through which purpose, value and truth can be discovered, and might
therefore be regarded as simply supplanting God with a similar structure of meaning.
193 See Jesse M Smith, "Creating a godless community: The collective identity work of contemporary
American atheists," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52, no. 1 (2013). 194 For a discussion of atheism's religious nature, see Chris Hedges, When Atheism Becomes Religion :
America's New Fundamentalists (New York: Free Press, 2009). 195 Mohler identifies the evangelistic intent and ambitious hope of the New Atheists as they seek to advance
their view that atheism is the only plausible worldview and persuade others to adopt this position. Mohler,
Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheists, 12. 196 Stahl, "One-dimensional Rage: The Social Epistemology of the New Atheism and Fundamentalism," 97. 197 These include the Sunday Assembly and Godless Revival networks. See:
https://www.sundayassembly.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/The-Godless-Revival-
532305740178434/ [accessed 5th September 2020]. 198 Huffington Post, "Atheist Church Split: Sunday Assembly and Godless Revival’s ‘Denominational
Chasm.’," (January, 2014); Jesse M Smith, "Can the Secular Be the Object of Belief and Belonging? The
Sunday Assembly," Qualitative Sociology 40, no. 1 (2017).
57
Indeed, in upholding the inspiration that can stem from scientific enquiry, Dawkins sounds
like an ardent religious believer:
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of
which the human psyche if capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest
that music or poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living.199
Science becomes an object of faith, a method to deliver intellectual certainty, which is
accompanied by a level of absolute confidence sometimes encountered in some
conservative religious communities. And in this way, the ‘scientism’ adopted by the New
Atheists appears to be rather similar to the literal interpretation of scripture that may be
practised in such traditions. It has the ideological character of a ‘legitimising myth,’ which
does not look so different to the strident claims of the religiously fundamentalist positions
that the New Atheists routinely attack.200 Borer detects this quasi-religious tendency in
much contemporary atheist rhetoric: ‘science is the New Atheists’ new god and Charles
Darwin is their patron saint.’201 The urgency with which science is upheld as the
appropriate field for thinking people to put their faith in suggests an evangelical zeal.202
Science, it is claimed, is not just another worldview amongst others. It is the sole
perspective that rational individuals should adopt if they are to break the spell of their
historically conditioned ‘need’ to believe in God.203 For this reason, Lash regards Dawkins
as a ‘fundamentalist in reverse.’204
199 Dawkins, The God Delusion, x. Interestingly, the opening chapter of Dawkins' work is entitled 'A
Deeply Religious Non-believer.' This book has sold over two million copies across the world. 200 Alister E McGrath, "Evidence, Theory, and Interpretation: The “New Atheism” and the Philosophy of
Science," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 37, no. 1 (2013). 201 Michael Ian Borer, "The New Atheism and the Secularization Thesis," in Religion and the New
Atheism: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Amarnath Amarasingam (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 137. 202 In effect, the New Atheists serve as secular priests and prophets for the power structures that now have
largely displaced those of Christendom. Perry, Atheism after Christendom: Disbelief in an Age of
Encounter, 37. 203 Borer, "The New Atheism and the Secularization Thesis," 135. 204 Nicholas Lash, "Where Does The God Delusion Come from?," New Blackfriars 88, no. 1017 (2007):
508.
58
1.7 Type II atheism
I have shown how the atheism that surfaced at the beginning of the modern era, flourished
as a strand within Enlightenment thought, and which re-emerged in recent decades, placed
great emphasis on the resources of human reason in order to assemble arguments against
the reality of God. The focus of this ‘atheism of the head’ is on the object of God and the
question of his existence. Another species of atheism, however, was to approach the
question of God from an altogether different angle, placing the focus not so much on the
matter of God’s existence or otherwise but on the struggle of humanity to be free of what
was sometimes seen to be an oppressive divine force. This crucial shift took place in the
nineteenth century. It changed the character of atheism from a critique of the evidence of
God’s existence to a rejection of the properties traditionally attributed to God.205 Such
atheism demonstrates the primacy of the human will over human reason in the rejection of
God.206
Type II atheism is ‘not so much a denial of God, then, as the substitution of humanity,
a change of subject rather than predicates: only a divinised humanity can secure the
confidence of wilful atheism.’207 It is a form of atheism that has found expression in
multiple species of unbelief, which range from hostility and antagonism toward
Christianity to much more subtle and complex critiques of the Christian faith. It might also
be added, however, that the thinkers who have embraced various forms of this feeling-
centred atheism, unlike many of the atheists who appeal to the resources of reason, such as
members of the New Atheist movement, have engaged very seriously with the faith of the
Church and offer arguments that have, in turn, been regarded by Christian thinkers as
worthy of careful reflection and thoughtful response. I must also acknowledge that
emotional factors remain very important today in provoking atheism and unbelief, whether
these are connected with indignation against the actions or moral stance of the Church, the
205 Patrick Masterson, "Contemporary Atheism," Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 54, no. 214/215
(1965): 132. 206 McLelland, Prometheus Rebound: The Irony of Atheism, 276. 207 McLelland, Prometheus Rebound: The Irony of Atheism, 291.
59
repulsion generated by unwelcome evangelism undertaken by some Christian groups in
public places, or with certain supposedly Christian doctrines, such as the existence of
hell.208 The work of some of the most important thinkers within this category of atheism
will be explored at a later stage in this section. In advance of that, however, I offer a number
of prefatory remarks may be made about the broad characteristics of Type II atheism.
1.7.1 The origin and nature of Type II atheism
As with reason-based atheism, Type II atheism has deep roots. It draws on the Promethean
impulse to transfer to humanity the attributes classically associated with God and thus
represents a form of ‘substitutionary humanism.’209 God is posited as Zeus, an
overpowering ruler whom humanity must challenge, usurp and even, in the term used by
Nietzsche’s madman, ‘murder.’ Counterpoising autonomy against divine heteronomy, this
heartfelt atheism centres on the quest for human liberation and independence. It is a moral
protest, a revolt against God that draws more on experience than logic as human freedom
and the autonomy of the will are pursued.
Kant’s postulatory proof of God’s existence is here turned into its opposite: not the
existence but the non-existence of God is postulated by human freedom. Even if God
existed, the fact could play no role in man’s life. Human autonomy contradicts every kind
of theonomy!210
As Jacques Maritain recognises, this form of atheism is not especially exercised by the
issue of evidence. It is, rather, often energetic in its opposition to the notion of God: ‘It is
in no way a mere absence of belief in God. It is rather a refusal of God, a fight against
God, a challenge to God.’211 Elsewhere, he characterises this style of unbelief as ‘an active
struggle against everything that reminds us of God – that is to say, antitheism,… a heroic
208 Two recent works have explored the emtional dimensions of contemporary doubt, unbelief and atheism.
See Rigsby, The Passion of the Atheist: Exploring the Emotional Aspects of Atheism; Ryrie, Unbelievers:
An Emotional History of Doubt. 209 McLelland, Prometheus Rebound: The Irony of Atheism, 3. 210 Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (London: SCM Press, 1984), 30. 211 Maritain, The Range of Reason, 98, 106. Emphases added.
60
effort to recast and reconstruct the whole human universe of thought and the whole human
scale of values according to that state of war against God.’212 Such polemical language
may, at times, overstate the antagonism inherent in the thought of Type II atheism. For, of
all the species of atheism considered in this study, it is the authors considered in this section
who have probably offered the most meaningful critiques of Christianity and who have
provoked the most stimulating and creative responses from academic theologians.
Philosophically, this orientation reflects a paradigm that is resistant to modernity’s
aspiration for a privileged, detached and timeless vantage point with which to gain access
to truth. Type II atheists have, in general, wanted to stress that epistemological neutrality
and absolute metaphysical insights are simply not possible. Rather, they highlight the fact
that that human enquiry into the nature of reality, including the question of God, is always
contaminated by the subject’s relationship with the object of knowledge, that our
participation in reality brings it into definition, and that absolute schemas, binary
oppositions and rigid categories need to be regarded with suspicion.213 Such an orientation
has brought focus to the human subject within its context of temporality, language, culture
and tradition. It has tended to resist both overarching metanarratives in connection with the
pursuit of truth and the controlling authority of institutional frameworks in association with
human affairs. Consequently, the Type II atheism that has been coloured by such
perspectives is marked by resistance to divinity, opposition to the Church, suspicion about
the place of God in the world and rejection, sometimes in venomous terms, of the universal
claims of religious believers. It has, at times, sought to highlight the deleterious nature of
faith, the delusional character of religion, and, correspondingly, the independence of
humanity that must be freed from the shackles of harmful supernatural belief. Why should
we believe in God, it is argued, when such a belief leads to human alienation and a naïve
and misplaced hope in a fantasy realm purportedly beyond the frame of this world? Our
role must, instead, be to make the most of this finite life, to seek personal fulfilment and to
212 Jacques Maritain, "On the meaning of contemporary atheism," The Review of Politics 11, no. 3 (1949):
268. 213 Nikkel, "The Postmodern Spirit and the Status of God," 46-47.
61
exhibit ‘the courage to be, the courage to live – in the face of death, of nothingness, of
failure, of suffering.’214
Undoubtedly presenting a profound challenge to Christianity, the atheism associated
with the intellectual climate of nineteenth-century Europe was unfolded in a series of
critiques centred on the Nietzschean proclamation of God’s death. And such a vision
continued, albeit in a somewhat modified form, through the twentieth century to the present
day. This is an atheism marked by the primacy of the will. It is altogether more impulsive,
sometimes lyrical, frequently caustic, often eloquent, a form of unbelief within which God
is regarded as a source of alienation, accusation and prohibition.215 Religion is typically
regarded by Type II atheism as ‘an instrument of social control whose surface conceptual
structure is designed to obscure its real function and to divert thought, emotion and energy
from real to unreal objects.’216 As a set of positions driven by feeling and instinct as much
as, if not more than, by rational analysis of conceptual inadequacies, it might be described
as an ideological opposition to God.217 Religion takes on a gloomy hue, more to be
repudiated than argued against. This attitude may stem, for many, not just from what might
be seen as the social control of the Church and the suffocating climate of oppression
putatively associated with a religious ethic, but by the experience of suffering and evil,
which has been so eloquently spelt out by Dostoevsky’s fictional character Ivan
Karamazov. It is a perspective that Karl Rahner acknowledges in one of his many
engagements with atheism:
The real argument against Christianity is the experience of life, this experience of
darkness. And I have always found that behind the technical arguments levelled by the
learned against Christianity – as the ultimate force and a priori pre-judgement supporting
214 T. M. Steeman, "What is Wrong with God? Some thoughts about modern atheism," New Blackfriars 47,
no. 554 (1966): 512. 215 Ricœur, "Religion, atheism, and faith," 441. 216 Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 266. 217 Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 78.
62
these scientific doubts – there are always these ultimate experiences of life causing the
spirit and the heart to be sombre, tired and despairing.218
This is the bleak and disconsolate experience of life discerned by Heidegger, who called
his age ‘an hour of night.’ The modern sense of loss and absence he detects leads him to
present a sombre portrait of humanity without God: ‘But alas! our generation walks in
night… dwells in Hades, without the divine.’219 Similarly, Michael Buckley equates this
same darkness with ‘an absence of religious faith or of any living theistic affirmation
together with an alienation, scepticism, or hostility towards religious doctrines and
institutions.’ Furthermore, he notes that it is a disposition that infused Western culture more
comprehensively than the arguments of reason-centred, Type I, atheism did: ‘for the first
time, this eclipse fell upon all ranks of society in Europe, from workers to bourgeois to
intellectuals, gathering strength to spread over into the twentieth century with an ideational
force unmatched since the Protestant Reformation.’220 As Shagan puts it: ‘Modern belief
would only emerge when the Reformation project of belief collapsed under its own
weight.’221
In summary, this second category of atheism concerns itself less with reason than with
feeling, suggesting that its symbolic origin is in the ‘heart’ rather than in the ‘head.’ As
Walters observes, Type II atheism is less about objective and evidential reasons than about
societal, biographical and psychological causes. Sometimes referred to as humanistic
atheism, such dissent is, perhaps, more focused on humanity than on God. For, it is not so
much a denial of God’s existence in itself as a statement of humanity’s inability to believe
that there is a God or to believe in a morally credible God. ‘God is dead because man is
not able any more to believe in God.’222 As Kasper notes, its point of departure ‘is not
218 Karl Rahner, "Thoughts on the Possibility of Belief Today," in Theological Investigations, Volume V
(London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), 6. 219 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 2010), 39. 220 Buckley, Denying and Disclosing God, 70. 221 Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment,
128. 222 Steeman, "What is Wrong with God? Some thoughts about modern atheism," 509.
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nature and substance, but subject and freedom.’223 The key motivating principle is human
autonomy, a flourishing that is impeded at both an individual and collective level by
religious belief. From such a perspective, God becomes ‘not the enhancement of humanity
but its estrangement.’224
In what follows, the contours of this spirited and defiant strand within the atheistic
critique of Christianity will be traced. This will involve an outline of how the new
coordinates of human-centred negation of religion led to the explicit rejection of the
Christian faith. The focus will be the principal ‘masters of suspicion,’ Feuerbach,
Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud,225 who argue, in different ways, that God is essentially a
projection of our imagination, values and desires. God is, in other words, a human creation.
However, it should be noted that a number of twentieth-century thinkers who have been
influenced by and sought to respond both to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and to the
phenomenology of Edmund Husserl also espoused a form of Type II atheism. These
thinkers include the French Existentialists, Sartre and Camus, as well as Heidegger,
Derrida and Lévinas. In different ways, they all question the power of reason to deliver
access to universal truth, including judgements (one way or the other) about the existence
of God, and in this way they lay the foundations for the proliferation of different faith
orientations that characterise the climate of postmodern religiosity, which, it should be
stressed, is generally much more measured and nuanced in its reflection on belief and
unbelief than the rebellious stance adopted by earlier expressions of Type II atheism. Some
of these later thinkers assert that the Christian faith is ultimately no more than a human
projection of a purely physical reality and, for this reason, their atheism represents a
‘negation of a negation,’226 and their work constitutes a formidable challenge to Christian
223 Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, 26. 224 Buckley, Denying and disclosing God, xiv. 225 It should be noted that Freud’s atheism is not at all easy to classify. Although he repudiates the
consolation that some people find religion provides for them, is suspicious of faith and regards religion as
delusional, he is also beholden to positivism, scientism, and empirical verificationism. His focus on the
lack of evidence for the claims of religious believers therefore makes him as much a Type I as a Type II
atheist. See Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism, 38-42, esp. 40. 226 Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, 33.
64
belief. Other thinkers have had a rather more complicated relationship with the Christian
faith and have offered, to both theists and atheists, ground for exploration and discovery.
1.7.2 The ‘masters of suspicion’
The thinkers that will be examined here advance a form of atheism that is more of an attack
on the Church and on religious life and practice than it is an argument for the non-existence
of God. This is not to say that the so-called masters of suspicion believed in God. In
general, they held no such faith and equated belief in God with self-deception.227 However,
the question of God’s reality was of less concern to them than the causes that rendered faith
in God unjustifiable. These included what were regarded as morally objectionable portraits
of God and the oppressive role that they saw the Church playing in contemporary
culture.228 The key issue is human freedom and the rejection of what Nietzsche refers to as
the ‘slave morality’ that he believed threatened humans from fulling their potential as
autonomous and creative individuals who are fully embroiled in the experiences and
limitations of this-worldly existence.
Marcel Neusch has identified four such factors which have generated this form of
opposition to the Christian faith.229
1. The problem of evil, which was acutely felt during the nineteenth century. Its existence
for some makes God morally impossible.
227 Peter A Huff, "Our Lady of Unbelievers: Mary and Modern Atheism," Marian Studies 64, no. 1 (2013):
138. 228 Huff, "Our Lady of Unbelievers: Mary and Modern Atheism," 138. 229 Marcel Neusch, The Sources of Modern Atheism: One Hundred Years of Debate over God (New York:
Paulist Press, 1982), 27-28.
65
2. The redundancy of God within a scientific worldview. Not all Type II atheists lionised
science (Nietzsche was suspicious of scientific ‘truth’230). However, a number of
thinkers retain this element of Type I atheism and argue that the scientific viewpoint
makes belief in God useless.
3. God undermines our freedom and represents an intolerable interference in the affairs
of human beings. God represents a ‘privileged spectator’ and is therefore to be rejected.
4. Drawing on the thought of Heidegger, there are no foundations for truth or of
metaphysical certainty. God, the ultimate symbol of the ‘tyranny of the logos,’ is
therefore to be rejected as metaphysically superfluous.
A different emphasis is placed on these various arguments by those rejecting belief in God
and the institution of the Church. However, they share a basic tendency, which is to be
suspicious of the place of God in human affairs, and wish to uphold, instead, the liberating
and life-affirming orientation that results when such faith is repudiated. I will now
summarise the principal contributions to Type II atheism of two key thinkers whose
influence on the development of modern unbelief has been enormous.
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), frequently regarded as the ‘father of modern atheism,’
represents a highly significant figure in the history of unbelief within the West. In his
Essence of Christianity, published in 1841, he sets out a thesis that ‘religion is the dream
of the human mind’231 and that the content of ‘God’ is to be understood as no more than
the essence of humanity, which we misleadingly believe to be something separate from us.
God is, for Feuerbach, nothing more than the projection of human subjectivity. In other
words, Feuerbach argues that, through the reduction of theology to anthropology, the
attributes traditionally ascribed to God (such as infinity) are actually human qualities.232
230 Nietzsche's dismissal of objective truth is well known: 'What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors,
metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced,
transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and
obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors
which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only
as metal, no longer as coins.' Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1971). 231 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, xxxix. 232 Neusch, The Sources of Modern Atheism: One Hundred Years of Debate over God, 35, 37.
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‘God is the mirror of man… God is for man the commonplace book where he registers his
highest feelings and thoughts.’233 Through this work, Feuerbach attempts to develop an
anti-theological project centred on the idea that when religion is unmasked it can be seen
for what it really is: the worship not of God but of man.234 The critique of Christianity that
he mounted was unsparing and so important to the unfolding of contemporary atheism
because of the enormous influence that it has exerted on subsequent thinkers. These include
Nietzsche,235 Wagner,236 Marx237 and Freud238 in the German-speaking world, as well as
George Eliot239 and Thomas Hardy240 along with many others in England. Furthermore,
Feuerbach’s anthropological revolt spawned a tradition of atheist humanism. As de Lubac
observes, ‘[m]an is getting rid of God in order to regain possession of the human greatness
that, it seems to him, is being unwarrantably withheld by another. In God he is
overthrowing an obstacle in order to gain his freedom.’241
Whilst Feuerbach’s impact has been considerable, there is little doubt that it is Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900) who represents the towering figure in the story of Western atheism.
… the greatest recent event, that God is dead, that belief in the Christian God had become
discredited, is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.242
In his desire to overturn the Platonic philosophical framework, supposedly founded on an
otherworldly conception of reality, his complex, rhapsodic and often compelling work
233 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 63. 234 Masterson, Atheism and Alienation: A Study of the Philosophical Sources of Contemporary Atheism, 63. 235 Paul Bishop, "Nietzsche's “new” morality: Gay science, materialist ethics," History of European ideas
32, no. 2 (2006): 3. 236 George G Windell, "Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner's Ring," Central European History 9, no. 1 (1976). 237 Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Hackett Publishing, 1997), 93, 400. 238 Cyril Levitt and Anouk Turgeon, "Sigmund Freud's Intensive Reading of Ludwig Feuerbach," Canadian
Journal of Psychoanalysis 17, no. 1 (2009). 239 Carroll, George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, 429. 240 Robert Schweik, "The influence of religion, science, and philosophy on Hardy’s writings," in The
Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. D. Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
66. 241 de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 23. 242 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books,
1974), 343.
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presents a relentless critique of Christianity and the morality associated with it, presages
the epistemological instability of postmodernity, and has had a monumental influence on
the discourse about religion in the century or so since his death. The bearing he has had on
philosophy has been enormous, and his writing was ingested and interpreted by figures that
include Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, Russell and Blanchot, as well as recent and
contemporary neo-Nietzschean philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, Nancy and
Deleuze. However, within the Christian tradition, Nietzsche has also been the subject of a
vast body of literature. His thought has been engaged with by numerous theologians,
including Barth, Bonhoeffer, Jaspers, Altizer (and other members of the ‘death of God’
movement), Kaufman, and Ricœur.243 Furthermore, the principal theologians examined in
this thesis – Jüngel, Hart, and de Lubac – all engage extensively with Nietzsche within
their projects.
Why is Nietzsche just such an important figure in the history of Western atheism? A
number of thoughts might be offered in response to this question. Firstly, Nietzsche
bypasses, to a large extent, questions concerning the existence or otherwise of God and he
jettisons rational examination of the claims of Christianity. His atheism is based more on
refutation than unbelief; it is a gesture of defiance of the divine, a raging and indignant
repudiation of Christianity that is essentially instinctive rather than intellectual.244
I regard Christianity as the most fatal seductive lie that has yet existed, as the great unholy
lie… I reject every compromise position with respect to it – I force a war against it.245
Whilst many in society today who consider themselves not to have a faith might be
reluctant to identify themselves fully with Nietzsche’s invective, the fact that it is his
sensibility rather than his reason which is offended by Christianity does, perhaps, resonate
with a contemporary spirit that rejects the message of the Church, expressing his unbelief
in a carefully articulated way. Secondly, because Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity is
243 For a helpful examination of Nietzsche’s reception within Christian theology, see Fraser, Redeeming
Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (London: Routledge, 2002), 3-23. 244 Beattie, The New Atheists, 149. 245 Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power : in Science, Nature, Society and Art, trans. Gordon D. Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage books, 1967), no. 200, 117.
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grounded more in issues of morality than in evidence, he articulates a sentiment that those
who wish to free themselves from a sense of oppression by the Church may relate to.246
His genealogical account of what he sees as Christianity’s ‘slave mentality,’ along with the
resentment (ressentiment in his parlance) so generated, coupled with his insistence that
humanity must embrace the will to power in order to realise the potential of the overman
(Übermensch), of which his Zarathustra is the epitome, have been persuasive notions for
those convinced that the Christian faith suffocates the human spirit and defrauds what is
best in us.247 Thirdly, it must be acknowledged that Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity
does shed light on some of the temptations that this faith tradition has succumbed to
throughout history, particularly through his unmasking of the deceptions that allow power
and ideology to masquerade as truth in God’s name,248 in exposing the presumption that
civilisation must be founded on Christianity, and also through his challenge to overly
determinate language about God that has, on occasions, been used by Christian thinkers.249
Finally, Nietzsche’s prophetic insight must be recognised as an extraordinary element
within his writing. As Neusch notes: His thought has proved to be astonishingly modern.
What he foresaw (the decline of Christianity) and what he predicted (post-Christian man)
have become realities before our eyes.250 Not only did he anticipate the diminishing place
of the Church and of Christian culture within Europe, he was able to recognise that the
removal of God from human consciousness would have lasting consequences for our
conception of morality, history, society and even of truth itself.
The best-known statement uttered by Nietzsche is to be found in his announcement that
‘God is dead,’ uttered by the madman in his work The Gay Science of 1882:
246 As Haar notes, Nietzsche’s beliefs are quite different to the ‘dogmatic and easy atheism of the kind
encountered in Diderot or in Sartre’ and he attaches far more importance to the end of morality than to the
end of metaphysics. Michel Haar, "Nietzsche and the Metamorphosis of the Divine," in Post-Secular
Philosophy : Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. Phillip Blond (London: Routledge, 1998), 158-59. 247 McLelland, Prometheus Rebound: The Irony of Atheism, 215-22. See also de Lubac, The Drama of
Atheist Humanism, 44. 248 Beattie, The new atheists, 149-50. 249 Joerge Salaquarda, "Nietzsche and the Judeo-Christian tradition," in The Cambridge Companion to
Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 91. 250 Neusch, The Sources of Modern Atheism: One Hundred Years of Debate over God, 110.
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The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he
cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how
did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the
entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither
is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging
continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down?
Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty
space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need
to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers
who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too,
decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’251
In this remarkable passage, the madman discerns the sheer enormity of the deed of deicide,
hinting at the guilt associated with the epochal act but also the challenge, perhaps an
impossible one, of finding a substitute infinity to take the place of God. The implications
of God’s death as articulated by Nietzsche are so far reaching for humanity, for culture and
for religion, and the significance of his attack on Christianity so profound that they still
demand consideration today. I will return to reflect on the responses offered to his critique
in subsequent chapters when I examine the engagements with Nietzsche advanced by
Jüngel, Hart and de Lubac. In these explorations I will illuminate the insight that, whatever
Nietzsche may have meant by the phrase ‘God is dead,’ these words did not put an end to
questions about God, and they shall help us interpret Heidegger’s statement that Nietzsche
was ‘the last German philosopher who was passionately in search of God.’252
In addition to the so-called ‘masters of suspicion,’ Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) also
warrants brief attention here due to the deep influence that religion and theology had on
his life and the important contribution that he made to what might be meant by unbelief in
connection with God. In the wake of Nietzsche, upon whose thought he drew extensively,
251 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181-82. 252 Martin Heidegger, "The Self-Assertion of the German University: Address, Delivered on the Solemn
Assumption of the Rectorate of the University Freiburg the Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts," The
Review of Metaphysics 38, no. 3 (1985): 479. See also Haar, "Nietzsche and the Metamorphosis of the
Divine," 157.
70
Heidegger’s particular significance lies in his repudiation of onto-theology, a neologism
he coined in order to characterise Western philosophy’s twin metaphysical preoccupations
since the age of the Greeks: ontology and theology. This enterprise, Heidegger argues, has
been logocentric in character in seeking to equate thinking with reason and explanation,
and it has pursued a generative ground (causa sui) for the wholeness of the whole as the
fundamental source of all being.253 Heidegger rejects the notion that reason can deliver
truth and holds that the metaphysical ‘God of philosophy’ is no more than an attempt to
incorporate the mystery of the divine within our own ontological categories. This
misleading and over-interpreted God compromises transcendence and gives rise to
atheism. Heidegger adopts Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead by speaking of the
death of the metaphysical God. ‘Before the causa sui man can neither fall to his knees in
awe nor can be play music and dance.’254 Despite this insistence, however, Heidegger,
particularly in his later work, leaves room for mystical apprehension of the divine and his
thought is not, in any sense, relentlessly atheistic or hostile to the idea of God’s reality:
The godless thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus
perhaps closer to the divine God. Here this means only: godless-thinking is more open to
Him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit.255
The death of the metaphysical God is not, then, for Heidegger, a loss. It is, rather, a prelude
to the possibility of a non-metaphysical relationship to God. Recalling Pascal’s exhortation
to lay aside the God of the philosophers in favour of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
Heidegger’s notion of the ‘divine God’ remains a source of an ‘other beginning,’ a new
age of the Holy, within which ‘God can indeed be God.’256 For this reason, the atheism
that Heidegger proposes does not close down the question of belief but offers a radical
253 John Peacocke, "Heidegger and the problem of onto-theology," in Post-Secular Philosophy : Between
Philosophy and Theology, ed. Phillip Blond (London: Routledge, 1998), 178-84; John R. Williams,
"Heidegger and the Theologians," The Heythrop Journal 12, no. 3 (1971): 259. 254 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), 72. 255 Heidegger, Identity and Difference, 72. 256 John D. Caputo, "Heidegger and theology," in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B.
Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 340-41.
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interpretation of unbelief as a purely ‘methodical atheism’ that offers the possibility of a
way into faith.257
1.8 Type III atheism
Although some contemporary expressions of atheism are rooted in either logical
argumentation or in an emotive rebellion against the strictures of religion and its creeds,
late modernity has also seen the emergence of another form of unbelief within Western
societies. A third type of atheism has arisen, which is driven less by rational analysis and
heart-felt dissent than by indifference and a casual sliding away from religious
commitment and faith in God. Closely associated with the development of supposedly
secular societies in the present era, it is perhaps more intuitive than it is intellectual, gaining
momentum amongst large swathes within the population, particularly in Europe, where
church attendance, Christian devotion and orthodox belief have simply ebbed away and
have ceased to represent central elements in lived experience. Since the second half of the
twentieth century, atheism in its multiplicity of manifestations has now become
demographically significant for the first time in human history, even in those countries
which until recently had high levels of religious adherence.258
Like the other categories of atheism that have been explored, this variety of unbelief is
heterogenous, multifaceted and internally differentiated. It has surfaced in a culture marked
by a spectrum of competing discourses, cultural diversity, increasing individual autonomy
and, it should be noted, a proliferation of different religious expressions. It might be
thought of as the unreflective cultural assimilation of the ‘death of God,’ heralded by
Nietzsche, although the extent to which the new majority of people in many Western
nations who now identify as possessing no religion would know or identify with
Nietzsche’s words is debatable. What appears to be the hallmark of Type III atheism is a
257 Laurence Paul Hemming, Heidegger's Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice (Notre Dame,
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 19-21. 258 See, for example, Michael Paul Gallagher, "Atheism Irish Style," The Furrow 25, no. 4 (1974).
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distancing from religion rather than a renunciation of God. We seem, then, to be inhabiting
the era anticipated by Bonhoeffer in his late prison writings: ‘We are approaching a
completely religionless age; people as they are now simply cannot be religious
anymore.’259 It might be argued that the current religious outlook for many within diverse
and religiously plural societies is threaded with uncertainty, indifference or even
bewilderment. As John Caputo has expressed it, society today, with regard to belief in God,
might be seen as ‘a space of undecidability before things are definitely settled one way or
the other.’260 Although writing before the firm establishment of secularism261 within
European nations, Rudolf Bultmann chooses rather different words to describe this form
of atheism, focusing more on indifference than on indecision:
An unconscious, so to speak, naïve atheism is the real enemy of faith in God. It consists in
simply ignoring the question of a transcendent reality and as a habitual attitude is the
consistent outcome of the secularization of modern culture, which in disposing of the
world of beings with its planning and organizing, takes no account of God, but for which
God is ‘dead.’262
Although Bultmann goes on to characterise such unbelief as ‘relative or provisional,’263
his assessment may overstress the opposition between ‘naïve atheism’ and genuine faith.
For, in most Western nations, this form of atheism has not generated a particularly strong
anti-religious sentiment. So, although on the face of it, at least for some commentators,
there are currents in contemporary thought that are radically atheistic,264 our examination
of this category of atheism must acknowledge its complexity, its cultural (rather than
intellectual or emotional) ground, and the somewhat porous boundary that distinguishes it
from orthodox faith. As Poupard observes:
259 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 362. 260 John D. Caputo, "Atheism, A/theology, and the Postmodern Condition," in The Cambridge Companion
to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 269. 261 The word ‘secularism’ was first coined by the editor and lecturer, George Holyoake (1817-1906). See
Palmer, "The Meaning of Atheism," 2. 262 Bultmann, "Protestant Theology and Atheism," 331. 263 Bultmann, "Protestant Theology and Atheism," 332. 264 Brian Wicker, "Atheism and The Avant‐Garde," New Blackfriars 51, no. 606 (1970): 527.
73
The church today is confronted more by indifference and practical unbelief than with
atheism… It is no longer a question of a public affirmation of atheism, with the exception
of a few countries, but a diffuse presence, almost omnipresent, in the culture.265
The tone of unbelief in Western societies today is, therefore, characterised more by lack of
concern with religion than it is by contempt or hostility toward the positions or institutions
associated with religious belief: ‘you have to care too much about religion to be
irreligious.’266 In our own country, as Stephen Bullivant observes, Britons… ‘do not
appear to inhabit a world where people are keenly interested in religion.’267 In his own
classification of atheistic positions, Glendinning refers to the form of unbelief we are
considering here as a-theism, situating it in the space between outright atheism and
religious commitment. It is an orientation that is marked by ‘mindless sheepishness: the
complete absence of any interest in religious commitment whatsoever, positive or
negative.’ He goes on to assert that it comprises people who, ‘while not full-blown atheists
(if asked)… do not live a life that cleaves to religious creeds [or] believe in a God able to
hear our prayers.’268
1.8.1 A contested religious inheritance
Type III atheists may wish to affirm some societal structures and norms that have grown
out of the West’s Judaeo-Christian heritage, such as universal human rights and the
existence of an ethical canopy which directs our actions. However, such endorsement may,
to a greater or lesser degree, be driven by what are thought to be non-religious conceptions
or morality and they may only be loosely held in a culture marked by such profound
diversity and the fragmentation of belief systems of any kind. The surfeit of religious
voices in contemporary society may have deafened a large proportion of the population, so
265 Paul Poupard, Where Is Your God?: Responding to the Challenge of Unbelief And Religious
Indifference Today (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2004), 12. 266 Steve Bruce, God is Dead : Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 42. 267 Stephen Bullivant, "The New Atheism and Sociology: Why Here? Why Now? What Next?," in Religion
and the New Atheism: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Amarnath Amarasingam (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 114. 268 Simon Glendinning, "Three cultures of atheism: on serious doubts about the existence of God,"
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (2013): 39-40.
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that notions of universality, rationality and truth in connection with faith and belief are
replaced by highly variegated positions distinguished by particularity, relativism and
contextuality.269 It has been argued that such a cultural environment actually represents a
‘new kind of space for religiosity,’ a notion that, in fact, follows from the work of several
late twentieth century French philosophers, some of whom were referred to in the previous
section.
It may be the case in countries such as Britain that, even amongst unbelievers, historic
places of worship, the cultural inheritance of Christianity and the structural connection
between the Church, the state and the monarchy are sources of some comfort. For others,
however, a degree of resistance to the perceived privileges conferred on religious
institutions provokes rather more vocal opposition to religion, which can find expression
in campaigns to create a more secular society. For still others, however, selected religious
beliefs and even practices, such as prayer, persist, although they may be decoupled from
either religious identity or belonging. And then there are those who may self-identify as
humanists, amongst whom a clearly articulated social ethic may be embraced and who may
be actively involved in dialogue with religious adherents in, for example, local interfaith
forums and Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education. In what follows some of
the most important facets of Type III scepticism and unbelief will be outlined.
1.8.2 A secular age?
The drift away from orthodox religious belief and participation within worshipping
communities, along with the progressive weakening of the role of religious institutions
within public affairs, are frequently described as features of that most complex of
269 See Beattie, The New Atheists, 133.
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processes, secularisation.270 There are multifarious understandings of secularism, for the
term is used in a variety of ways. On occasions, secularism represents a programmatic
attempt to restrict the voice and influence of religious groups within corporate life such as
in politics, the media, education, healthcare chaplaincy and social care.271 In other
instances, the word is used to denote a neutral stance that seeks to open up a space within
which a variety of views – both religious and non-religious – can be expressed and lived
out in a mutually respectful manner.272 In this sense of the word, secularism is formally
agnostic, instead of atheistic. It shows that secularism need not always involve a rejection
of religious belief, identity, and practice, nor the lack of respect for the place of religious
communities within society.273 It should be noted, however, that such a standpoint does
not necessarily constitute a positive disposition towards religious expression in society.
Religious beliefs and institutions may be more tolerated than welcomed, and faith
commitment must be exercised in accordance with the strictures of a neo-liberal ideology,
which can be deeply resistant to religious authority or dogmatism.
The roots of secular culture may be traced back to the Judaeo-Christian emphasis on the
fundamental ontological distinction between Creator and creation. This set the stage for
‘the eventual rationalisation and disenchantment of the world,’ a process that was
encouraged by other significant transformations within Western history, such as the
Reformation, the emergence of Renaissance humanism, the European wars of religion and
270 For Pope Benedict XVI, secularism impoverishes spiritual horizons and diminishes opportunities for
self-transcendence, creating a void that is filled the adulation of celebrities or the pseudo-liturgies of youth
culture. It leads, he argues, to a contemporary reworking of the error of Pelagius, which involves society
placing trust in institutions and in education without any reference to God or the inerior dynamics of the
human soul. Tracey Rowland, Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 79,
82. 271 Fenella Cannell, "The Anthropology of Secularism," Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 86. 272 This is the position adopted by Andrew Copson in a very fair-minded discussion of a form of secularism
that allows for a range of religious and non-religious positions within society. Andrew Copson, Secularism:
A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); See also Frank L. Pasquale and Barry
A. Kosmin, "Atheism and the Secularization Thesis," in The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, ed. Stephen
Bullivant and Michael Ruse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 458. 273 The positive interpretation of secularism, which makes space for, although does not privilege any
particular religious group, is discussed in Mark Cladis, "Religion, Secularism, and Democratic Culture,"
The Good Society 19, no. 2 (2010): 23-25.
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the Enlightenment.274 The notion that Western societies were inescapably pursuing a
trajectory that would take them from a condition where the values and organisational
structures associated with religion to one where national institutions and the wider
behaviour of the population comes to be set within non-religious frameworks is known as
the ‘secularisation thesis.’ This has its roots in the critiques of religion and its role in both
corporate and individual decision making that were advanced by Comte, Marx and Freud.
However, a more thoroughgoing articulation of the thesis was developed by the
sociologists Max Weber (1864-1920) and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). Weber famously
refers to the ‘disenchantment of the world,’ which he saw as lying at the heart of the
secularisation process.275 These and other theorists hold that there is an ineluctable
transition ‘from a society dominated by magic, myth, superstition and religion, into one
with a cognitively superior outlook in which these categories are disclosed as delusions
that we shed in the name of reason, criticism and science.’276 Throughout much of the
twentieth century, the process of secularisation seemed to be following the predictions of
those who had forecast its outcome. This was especially true during the 1960s, often
described as the ‘decade of secularisation’ in the West. During the so-called ‘long Sixties,’
from 1958 to 1974, there were dramatic drops in church attendance, an erosion of Christian
identity and awareness, a multiplication of world-views, the rise of liberal or even
heterodox theological views (most keenly seen in Bishop John Robinson’s 1963
publication Honest to God) and legal changes in connection with divorce, abortion and
contraception.277
There is little doubt that the ‘sacred canopy’ that had once provided an orientation for
human experience and our understanding of the world has been progressively undermined
by some of the cultural shifts that have taken place in modern history and that, increasingly,
274 Alan D. Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain: A History of the Secularization of Modern
Society (London: Longman, 1980), 18-39. 275 George Levine, "Introduction," in The Joy of Secularism: 11 essays for how we live now, ed. George
Levine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 2. 276 Simon Glendinning, "Religiosity and secularity in Europe," in Religion and Atheism: Beyond the
Divide, ed. Anthony Carroll and Richard Norman (New York: Routledge, 2016), 200. 277 McLeod, "The Religious Crisis of the 1960s," 205-8.
77
personal and institutional decisions are now made on an instrumental or rational basis.278
Such a process has been accompanied by the lack of, or loss of, or disinterest in, faith and
belief. Secularisation is, then, in some sense connected with atheism, the focus of this
study. However, it needs to be stressed that the story is far more complex than the narratives
outlined by the early social scientists, who predicted that religious frameworks and
personal faith would be slowly extinguished from society. Although secularism and Type
III atheism are clearly related, they are certainly not identical. The resurgence of religious
life in the global South, and in some faith groups, such as large black-majority
congregations that are located in many Western cities, within recent years; the discovery
that large numbers of people, even if they do not identify with any particular religion,
continue to hold quasi-religious beliefs; the increasing recognition that is being given by
the state to the role played by religious communities in social welfare; and the renewed
interest in religion and, more broadly, themes connected to transcendence, in Continental
philosophy, have all conspired to undermine the confident predictions that individual belief
and organised religious life will come to an end.279
Furthermore, it should be recognised that some Christian commentators are not troubled
by the notion of secularism and, indeed, see it as the necessary condition for a democratic
society to thrive and also as the basis for a positive plurality of beliefs and worldviews to
coexist. Of those who have affirmed elements of contemporary secularity and have seen
within them the ground for human flourishing, arguably the most prominent within the
Christian tradition is the Canadian political and social philosopher, Charles Taylor. His
monumental work A Secular Age traces the unfolding nature of secularity within the West
in the modern era. Taylor rejects the thesis that modernity led to the ‘death of God’ and
suggests that a focus on religion has not, in fact, been lost in our age. Rather, he argues
278 Pasquale and Kosmin, "Atheism and the Secularization Thesis," 453. 279 The influential sociologist, Peter Berger, for example, who had been one of those to anticipate the
demise of religion within the West, revised his views at the end of the last century, describing the world
today ‘as furiously religious as ever.’ Peter L. Berger, "The desecularization of the world: a global
overview," in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter L.
Berger (Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans, 1999), 2.
78
that secularism fosters a vast range of faiths and beliefs within civilisations marked by
‘overlapping consensuses.’280
This perspective stems from Taylor’s dismissal of ‘subtraction’ theories of
secularisation, which hold that God has been rendered unnecessary and has thus been
eradicated from human experience such that we now live in a ‘disenchanted’ world.281
Eschewing exclusive humanism, Taylor asserts that as the modern era has progressed,
since around 1500, the sources of what he terms ‘fulness’ have shifted from an inescapable
orientation toward God to a host of different resources. These may, in fact, involve the
denial of God, but they, nonetheless, enable people to discern something that is beyond or
transcendent to their lives even within the ‘immanent frame.’282 In acknowledging the
manifold forms of lived experience that are open to mystery, he is able to develop a broad
and generous definition of religious life, which he detects traces of wherever a ‘vertical
axis’ in our experience is present.283 Taylor is not entirely uncritical of the transition that
society has witnessed as a sense of enchantment has ebbed away. Thus he rues the move
from what he calls the ‘porous’ self, which was conscious of its fragility, its connection
with the natural world and of a dependence on divine providence, to the ‘buffered’ self,
which seeks autonomy, separation from, and rational control of, nature (and the other).284
Nonetheless, his elastic interpretation of religion certainly challenges narrow conceptions
of secularism, which focus on the removal of religion from society and it may offer a
framework within which a potentially fruitful dialogue between those with and without a
religious commitment can be made possible.285
280 Taylor, A Secular Age, 532, 693. 281 Taylor, A Secular Age, 26. 282 Taylor, A Secular Age, 16. An example of this is provided by Barbara Ehrenreich, who, despite her
atheism, charts a spiritual odyssey that was provoked by a profoundly mystical experience in her
adolescent years that enabled her to encounter transcendence in the everyday world. Barbara Ehrenreich,
Living with a Wild God: A Non-believer's Search for the Truth about Everything (London: Granta Books,
2015). 283 Taylor, A Secular Age, 57. 284 Taylor, A Secular Age, 37-42, 134. 285 See Ruth Abbey, "Siblings under the skin: Charles Taylor on religious believers and non-believers in A
Secular Age," in Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide, ed. Anthony Carroll and Richard Norman (New
York: Routledge, 2016), esp. 222, 28-30.
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A number of commentators, conscious of the persistent place of religion and belief
within contemporary society, even in those nations where levels of religious adherence are
dropping, are now referring to our age as ‘post-secular.’ One of the more influential voices
in this regard has been that of the critical theorist and philosophical pragmatist Jürgen
Habermas. Habermas argues that, despite the cleavage between secular reason and faith
(which generates dissonance between the modes of discourse associated with liberal
democratic rhetoric and the language of faith), religion must ‘open itself up to the
normatively grounded expectation that it should recognize, for reasons of its own, the
neutrality of the state towards worldviews.’286 However, there is also a burden on the
secular state. For Habermas, it must:
…face the question of whether it is imposing asymmetrical obligations on its religious
citizens. For the liberal state guarantees the equal freedom to exercise religion not only as a
means of upholding law and order, but also for the normative reason of protecting the
freedom of belief and conscience of everyone. [The state] may not demand anything of its
religious citizens which cannot be reconciled with a life that is led authentically ‘from
faith.’287
Within the field of Continental philosophy there has also been extensive reflection on the
notion of post-secularity. Interestingly, this development has been traced to the thought of
Nietzsche, who would not, on the face of it, be an obvious authority to appeal to in
connection with the ‘return’ of religion in present times, given his forceful denunciation of
the distinction between transcendence and immanence. However, as John Caputo
identifies, the ‘death of God’ announced by Nietzsche not only signalled the end of
metaphysical theism, it also spelt ‘the death of any kind of monism or reductionism,
including secularism.’288 Developing the work of the philosophers situated within the
French phenomenological tradition, a number of contemporary thinkers have turned to
religious themes, including ethics, justice, alterity, the eschaton and universalism and have
286 Jürgen Habermas, "An awareness of what is missing," in An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and
Reason in a Post-secular Age, ed. Michael Reder and Josef Schmidt (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 20. 287 Habermas, "An awareness of what is missing," 21. 288 John D. Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2002), 133. Emphasis added.
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sought to undermine a secular logic that seeks to offer assured and totalising depictions of
the world based on purely immanent conceptions of reality.289 Additionally, as I shall
explore more fully in examining the final category in my typology of atheism, religious
themes represent areas of serious interest for several philosophers who themselves identify
as atheist. These include Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou. Disparate
though the work of these thinkers is, it shares a distrust of Enlightenment rationalism and
is suspicious of thought that purports to offer a ‘fixed centre’ or foundational schema.
Although orthodox Christian faith is not embraced by these writers, their incredulity
toward overarching meta-narratives undermines any clear case for scientific atheism as
much as it questions modes of metaphysical thought.290 In her survey of some themes
within the turn to religion in French intellectual thought, Barker holds that the key element
of the post-secular culture we may be moving through is the priority of the other, a concern
shared by philosophy and theology and which provides the basis for and an invitation to
dialogue.291 It is a reflection that, once more, highlights how questionable the predicate
‘secular’ is for the Western world.
1.9 Type IV atheism
The final forms of atheism that I will examine represent an attempt to eradicate faith in
God by emphasising the radically immanent frame of human experience. Grounded in a
thoroughgoing embrace of materiality, these critiques repudiate what is sometimes seen as
the primordial status given by theism to immortality and to the immaterial. Connected with
a number of contemporary philosophers, mainly operating within the Continental tradition,
the ‘radical’ atheism that will be discussed here asserts the irreversibility of the death of
289 These include, in addition to Caputo himself, the Italian postmodern philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, the
French feminist, linguist and philosopher Luce Irigaray and the French philosopher and intellectual
historian Michel Foucault, all of whom reject the binary opposition of faith and reason and who allow for
traces of transcendence in the human experience of encounter, engagement and justice 290 Caputo, "Atheism, A/theology, and the Postmodern Condition," 267-68. 291 Victoria Barker, "After the Death of God: Postsecularity?," Journal of Religious History 33, no. 1
(2009): 94-95.
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God, the impossibility of God’s existence, and is opposed to moves that seek to retrieve
theological modes of thought, such as those encountered in the philosophical turn to
religion or in the notion of post-secularism, both of which were briefly discussed above.
For Gilles Deleuze, one such thinker whose atheism belongs to this category, being is laid
out in a ‘plane of immanence,’ or ‘plane of Nature.’292 This amounts to a ‘flat ontology’ in
which everything is included on one common plane, not immanent to something else, to
some ‘supplementary dimension’ such as a transcendent realm.293 Such a resolute
expression of atheism may draw on philosophical materialism and, for this reason, might
be thought of as an atheism of the body.294
On the face of it, radical – or absolute – atheism entails ‘an active struggle against
everything that reminds us of God… and at the same time a desperate… effort to recast
and reconstruct the whole human universe of thought.’295 Such atheological frameworks,
marked by a complete denial of divinity or of transcendence, are, however, difficult to
realise and, even in the work of putatively ardent atheist thinkers, suggestions of religious
themes, consciously held or otherwise, may persist. As Christopher Watkin expertly
highlights, ‘thinking without God’ in the atheistic projects of contemporary philosophy is
actually almost impossible. His study of the atheistic formulations of Alain Badiou, Jean-
Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux, unearths a latent parasitism within their work, within
which theological motifs are concealed, betraying echoes and traces of the divine.296 Some
remarks about the provenance and characteristics of this broad category of thought will
now be set out.
292 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995), 145. 293 Christopher Ben Simpson, Deleuze and Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 17. 294 Deleuze is especially concerned with the body as the 'field of desire.' He holds that the plane of
composition that frames our existence is 'a continuum immanent to the body.' Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The
Athlone Press, 1988), 154. 295 Maritain, "On the meaning of contemporary atheism," 104. 296 Christopher Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and
Quentin Meillassoux (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), See esp. Ch. 3, pp. 95-131.
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Firstly, the heritage of Type IV atheism must be located within the thought of Friedrich
Nietzsche, the principal voice of early forms of Type II atheism, which I discussed above.
Nietzsche was contemptuous of the prevailing atheism of his age for its inability to grasp
the full reality of God’s death. He saw that for the full implications of this event to be
realised metaphysics has to be utterly overturned and a systematic transformation of
European culture and the values upon which it is built needs to take place.297 Nietzsche
was conscious of the enduring shadow of faith, which insinuates itself in the scientific
method and even in the structures of language. Indeed, he held that as long as we continue
to believe in grammar and in the metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions
concealed within language we will continue to believe in God.298 The project of Type IV
atheist thinkers might, in their various directions of travel, may be thought of as an attempt
to work out the meaning of such a fundamental rethinking of what atheism can mean in
human experience. However, for all their dependence on Nietzsche, they are not always
uncritical conversation partners with him, detecting the traces of a lingering orientation
toward God not only in the culture that Nietzsche critiqued but also concealed within his
own principles and rhetoric. Alain Badiou, a leading exponent of contemporary radical
atheism, interprets within Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead a theistic schema that points
to an ongoing enthrallment with a worldview that still incorporates the infinite and the
immutable.299
Secondly, a number of thinkers in the broad field of Type IV atheism must be considered
as anti-humanist. Far from affirming humanism’s critique of religion, whether in its
Renaissance, liberal nineteenth century or politicised twentieth-century forms, humanism
is often condemned for its adulation of humanity and its intoxication with the myth of
297 Joseph M. Spencer, "The Religious Significance of the Atheist Conception of Life," Radical Orthodoxy:
Theology, Philosophy, Politics 2, no. 2 (June 2014): 272-73. 298 Alan D. Schrift, "Nietzsche and the critique of oppositional thinking," History of European Ideas 11
(1989): 786. 299 Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin
Meillassoux, 22.
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human progress.300 The atrocities of the twentieth century were hugely influential here,
undermining such visions of humanity’s stature and eroding the notion that we possesses
a fundamental nature that is essentially good: ‘Faced with philosophical opposition and
political catastrophe, the status of humanism eroded dramatically, taking with it the
imagination of modern humanity based on innate qualities, characters or rights.’301 Thus,
during the on the philosophy of the previous century, particularly, although not exclusively,
in French intellectual culture, a horizon of thought opened which situated atheism within
an anti-utopian, anti-foundational and anti-humanist framework. This mode of thought is
associated with philosophers such as Georges Bataille, Alexandre Kojève, Maurice
Blanchot, Emmanuel Lévinas (who formulated this turn as ‘an atheism that is not
humanist’),302 all of whom draw on Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism.’ Later in the
century, it gained expression in the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault,303 Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy as well as the critiques of the Enlightenment mounted
by members of the Frankfurt School. Their negative anthropologies and anti-systematic
philosophies recoil against ‘anthropotheistic’ conceptions of humanity such as those
developed by Denis Diderot in his article on L’Homme in the Encyclopédie, Ludwig
Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity and Auguste Comte’s ‘religion of humanity.’
They argue that such theocentric humanism, along with the philosophical anthropologies
that undergird it, are thoroughly discredited by the atrocities of human callousness and
violence, and that the wreckage of a century of conflict has discredited the whole Western
notion of human perfectibility.304
Thirdly, it should be noted that many of the thinkers to be considered in this section, in
continuity with Nietzsche, espouse a form of atheism that is not only radically anti-
300 The anti-humanist orientation in twentieth-century literature and philosophy may be traced back to
Nietzsche's project. See Elizabeth Kuhn, "Toward an Anti-Humanism of Life: The Modernism of
Nietzsche, Hulme and Yeats," Journal of Modern Literature 34, no. 4 (2011). 301 Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, Calif:
Stanford University Press, 2010), 1. 302 Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 127. 303 Foucault famously stated 'Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.' Michel
Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1989), 386-87;
see also Roger Paden, "Foucault's Anti-Humanism," Human Studies 10, no. 1 (1987): 123. 304 Geroulanos, An Atheism that Is Not Humanist, 23.
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religious but also fiercely critical of many other kinds of atheism. This is highly significant,
since it once again highlights the tremendous range of, and tensions between, the positions
that constitute contemporary atheism. Martin Hägglund, for example, undoubtedly one of
the most prominent of the radical philosophical atheists, rejects the kind of ‘vulgar atheism’
of the New Atheist movement, which, he holds, is formally theistic despite the fact that it
camouflages itself as materially atheistic. His principal objection is that ‘it affirms the
desirability – and thus primordiality – of [the] immortality’ that it purports to reject. For
Hägglund , life is irreparably mortal to its core.305 Such traditional atheistic critiques are
dismissed by Hägglund as melancholic, pragmatic or therapeutic. They outwardly dismiss
the reality of God and eternity but betray a wish that such things, were they to exist, would
be desirable.
The common denominator for all these models of atheism is the assumption that the
religious desire for absolute immunity is operative. When we desire the good, we desire an
absolute good that is immune from evil, and when we desire life, we desire an absolute life
that is immune from death. The fundamental drama of human existence is thus seen as the
conflict between the mortal being that is our fate and the immortal being that we desire.306
Similarly, Vardoulakis shuns both secularism and most contemporary atheism, reading
them as Christian-derived phenomena, which continue to belong to their Christian
‘signifying horizon.’
My position cannot be further away from currently fashionable rationalist-naturalist
atheism (espoused by the likes of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris)… Christian-derived
atheism may be said to be distilled in the declaration ‘I don’t believe in God’ or ‘I don’t
believe there is a God.’ This statement amounts to self-delusion insofar as it refuses to
acknowledge that the negation it claims participates in the terminological framework of
305 Spencer, "The Religious Significance of the Atheist Conception of Life," 275, 77. 306 Martin Hägglund, "The challenge of radical atheism: a response," The New Centennial Review 9, no. 1
(2009): 229.
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belief, a discourse that, from the standpoint of religious conviction, belong to the
epistemology of God.307
Traditional atheism is typically denounced either as parasitic on religion, for it seeks to
reject God in ways that require or assume God, or as ascetic, for, along with God, it is
forced to renounce, albeit reluctantly, the notions of truth, beauty and goodness that are
tied up with the image of God in human thought. The alternative position, which is pursued
by Type IV atheists, consists of a thoroughgoing materialism that supposedly jettisons all
pretension of belief in God and his very desirability. For Badiou, for example, God as the
metaphysical ‘One’ is strictly impossible, not just absent, peripheral or irrelevant.308 And
Nancy is equally dismissive of any system that substitutes for God another governing
principle or authority:
There is not even ‘atheism’; ‘atheist’ is not enough! What we need to hollow out is the
positing of a principle. It is not enough to say that God absents himself, withdraws or again
is incommensurable. Much less is it a case of placing another great principle on his throne
– Man, Reason, Society. It is a case of grasping this with both hands: the world rests on
nothing – and that is its most vivid sense.309
In what follows, the lineaments of some philosophical positions will be outlined as these
are encountered in selected atheistic thinkers.
1.9.1 Radical atheism in contemporary philosophy
Jean-Luc Nancy (b. 1940) is typical of the group of radical thinkers considered here in
seeking to move beyond the parasitic atheism prevalent within contemporary culture. He
is equivocal about applying the label ‘atheist’ to himself, believing that it needs to be
307 Dimitris Vardoulakis, "Why I Am Not a Post-secularist," in Lessons in Secular Criticism, ed. Stathis
Gourgouris (Fordham University, 2013), 68-69. 308 Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin
Meillassoux, 29. 309 Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II, trans. John McKeane (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013), 48.
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deconstructed in the same way that theism does.310 In his two-volume work,
Déconstruction du christianisme, he engages with Christian themes, working out his
principal assertion that it is impossible that there is any ‘pre-existing single, substantial
essence of Being.’311 Although his work is modulated by Christianity, he argues that
monotheism is, in truth, atheism and that atheism is Christianity realised because, for him,
‘[t]he unicity of God… signifies the withdrawal of God from presence and thus also from
the power thereby understood.’312 Nancy’s own account of the death of God is that this
event is irreversible and that both God and religion are ‘finished.’ This leads him to reject
the so-called ‘turn to religion’ in Continental philosophy; ‘[t]here is no return of the
religious: there are the contortions and the turgescence of its exhaustion.’313
Gilles Deleuze (1925-95) also situates his philosophical project in the wake of
Nietzsche’s death of God, developing an anti-theistic system of thought based on the
affirmation of ‘multiplicity as the most fundamental unity.’314 His preoccupation with
difference, which he roots in Nietzsche’s affirmation of life, leads Deleuze to reject any
metaphysical framework that would ‘judge and depreciate life in the name of a supra-
sensible world.’315 This is the basis of his dismissal of transcendent hierarchical structures
and of his vision of the world as one of pure immanence.316 Such an orientation generates
the atheistic horizon in Deleuze’s work, a position that has been described as anti-
theological given his view that God is a dam that needs to be burst. God, for Deleuze, must
310 Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin
Meillassoux, 33. Nancy's ambiguity about his relationship with faith is evident in the following statement:
'If it is simple and necessary to be an atheist, it is neither so simple nor so necessary to be "without God."'
See Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure : the deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel
Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 115. 311 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), 29; see also Marie-Eve Morin, "Towards a Divine Atheism: Jean-Luc
Nancy’s Deconstruction of Monotheism and the Passage of the Last God" (paper presented at the
Symposium, 2011). 312 Jean-Luc Nancy, "Deconstruction of monotheism," Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 42. 313 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought, trans. Francois Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Amherst, N.Y:
Humanity Books, 1997), 136. 314 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and philosophy (London: Continuum, 2006), xi-xii. 315 Deleuze, Nietzsche and philosophy, 147. See also Simpson, Deleuze and Theology, 7. 316 Simpson, Deleuze and Theology, 17.
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be forgotten in order for philosophy to begin.317 The God of Kant’s disjunctive syllogism,
the negative exclusionary force which gives identity and immortality to the self through
divine mastery, is rejected by Deleuze. Instead, he upholds the ‘order of the Antichrist,’
within which ‘difference, divergence and decentering [affirm disjunction] as such an
affirmative and affirmed power.’318
[The anti-divine order] is characterised by the death of God, the destruction of the world,
the dissolution of the person, the disintegration of bodies, and the shifting function of
language which now expresses only intensities.319
Here Deleuze re-presents the Nietzschean line of atheistic thought, arguably going further
by celebrating the death of God as the guarantor of human identity and seeing in such an
event the dissolution of human selfhood.320 In this way, any possibility of analogy between
humanity and divinity is dismissed; ‘all claims to the possibility of an identity established
within the “order of God” must be surrendered.’321 In place of a transcendent authoring of
a worldly and creaturely simulacra, Deleuze insists that human existence is characterised
by a constant flux of truly infinite becoming and a ‘strange unity’ that applies the
multiple.322
An important motif within Deleuze’s thought is that of the body. As Poxon highlights,
this is neither the physical or spiritual body of Christian theology, which is held to be
created by God as an organism and which is both subject to divine judgement and is a
carrier of eschatological hope. Deleuze rejects the possibility of an analogical thread
connecting us and God. Rather, in replacing identity with difference, Deleuze proposes a
317 Simpson, Deleuze and Theology, 49. 318 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (London: Athlone, 2001), 296-97. 319 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 294. 320 Judith Poxon, "Embodied Anti-theology: The Body without Organs and the Judgement of God," in
Deleuze and religion, ed. Mary Bryden (London: Routledge, 2001), 49. 321 Poxon, "Embodied Anti-theology: The Body without Organs and the Judgement of God," 44-45. 322 Poxon, "Embodied Anti-theology: The Body without Organs and the Judgement of God," 44, 46.
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‘theological body,’ a ‘body without organs’ as a challenge to divine order and an
expression of pure affirmation.323
In contrast to the body-as-organism, the theological body… is ‘an affective, intensive,
anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds and gradients. It is traversed
by a powerful, nonorganic vitality’ and is defined not in its wholeness, its identity, but
rather ‘in its becoming, it is intensity, as the power to affect or to be effected.’324
Deleuze is clear that the body without organs is in no sense to be regarded as having been
made in the image of God. It supports, rather, a demonic image, or, in his words, ‘an image
without likeness…, stripped of resemblance.’325 Within Deleuze’s order of the Antichrist,
pre-individual and impersonal singularities lead to the loss of identity of the self, which
promotes the ‘intense multiplicity and power of metamorphosis, where relations of force
play with one another.’326
As with Nancy, Deleuze is not always entirely able, nor does he necessarily intend, to
resist theological themes, as is evident in the presence of an anti-Christ motif in his work,
and it might be thought that his mutation of theology has the potential to generate a new
conception of God that offers a different way of understanding our being in the world.327
As Bryden notes, there are pulses of religion within Deleuze’s writing, mystical
affirmations of life, and even references to spiritual ‘practices,’ such as Taoism and
sorcery, which suggest that his philosophy is, perhaps, more open to theological
interpretation than might at first appear to be the case.328 Some authors have detected in
Deleuze’s interest in human creativity, and in the generative processes that operate within
thought, theological echoes. Thus, Davies reads in the Deleuzian idea that intellectual
323 Poxon, "Embodied Anti-theology: The Body without Organs and the Judgement of God," 42. 324 Poxon, "Embodied Anti-theology: The Body without Organs and the Judgement of God," 45; the
quotation is from Gilles Deleuze, Essays critical and clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A.
Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 131. 325 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum Publishing Group, 2004), 127. 326 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 297. 327 Anthony Smith, "The Judgment of God and the Immeasurable: Political Theology and Organizations of
Power," Political Theology 12, no. 1 (2011): 79. 328 Mary Bryden, "Introduction," in Deleuze and Religion, ed. Mary Bryden (London: Routledge, 2001), 2.
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creation stems from difference as absence or negation a form of creatio ex nihilo, which
aligns Deleuze with the transcendental notion of the One in Plotinus and Eckhart.329
Drawing further on work in this area, Burrell suggests that Deleuze’s work can serve to
incorporate within a Christian theology of creation a robust affirmation of the world, which
may prevent God’s creative act from being overshadowed by an overly redemption-centred
focus.330 Even Deleuze’s insistence that difference is the essential mark of being can, for
Hart, be accommodated within a trinitarian theological framework that speaks of the one
God in terms of originary difference through patterns of divine ‘supplementation,
repetition, variation’ and of God’s plenitude, which gratuitously bestows in the difference
of creation an analogically-related pattern that refers back to its divine source.331
Furthermore, even if his depictions of God are taken at face value, several Christian
commentators have argued that the God and Christianity rejected by Deleuze are actually
‘pale shades, caricatures [and] counterfeit doubles that are worthy of rejection.’332 So,
despite claiming to oppose, point for point, the divine order with the system of the
Antichrist,333 Deleuze’s atheism need not be regarded as completely refractory to Christian
readings as its author may intend it to be. As Simpson notes, God or the divine does not
disappear entirely in Deleuze’s work. His Spinozist insistence on the priority of immanence
may, in fact, support an authentically Christian reading of the human encounter with God
in this world, such as the worldliness set out by Bonhoeffer in his prison writings.334 It is
for this reason that Simpson argues that Deleuze’s work, understood in Christian terms,
329 Oliver Davies, "Thinking difference: A comparative study of Gilles Deleuze, Plotinus and Meister
Eckhart," in Deleuze and religion, ed. Mary Bryden (London: Routledge, 2001), 82. 330 David B. Burrell, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1993), 3; see also Simpson, Deleuze and Theology, 82. 331 David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Cambridge:
Eerdmans, 2003), 180-81. It should be added that Hart is critical of Deleuze in other respects, particularly
in relation to Deleuze's notion that difference is an ontic violence or rupture. 332 Simpson, Deleuze and Theology, 54; as Bryden puts it: 'The old God is dead for Deleuze. The spiritual,
however, remains...' "Introduction," 4. 333 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 294. 334 In his letters to Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer frequently refers to a 'world come of age' in which our
encounter with divine revelation is 'this-wordly.' Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison.
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can offer an opportunity to think positively and creatively about the world and our place
within it.335
Alain Badiou (b. 1937), one of contemporary philosophy’s most creative thinkers,
presents a thoroughgoing critique of Christianity, which is summarised in his conviction
that ‘God is finished. And religion is finished too.’336 As with most other representatives
of Type IV atheism, Badiou’s thought is rooted within a Nietzschean framework, which
has led to the development of a philosophical orientation that has political, as well as
intellectual, import.337 In his anti-theological philosophy of immanence, he seeks to
demolish all notions of God, whether these are grounded in the ‘somebody’s God’ of lived
experience; in the ‘God-Principle’ of metaphysics, which locate all being in the One; or in
the superstitious mysticism of poetry.338 This orientation stems, for Badiou, from his
synthesis of philosophy and mathematics, particularly his use of Georg Cantor’s axiomatic
set theory, out of which he develops an ontology that explicitly denies the existence of
God.339 The priority that Badiou gives to numbers within his philosophical system, the
decision he gives to the multiplicity of being and the affirmation of the actual infinite are
applied to his analysis of the issue of the relationship of the many to the one, bequeathed
to the Western tradition by Parmenides. Badiou asserts that although the one exists, as in
the ‘count-as-one,’ all presentation and thus being qua being is ‘nothing but infinite
335 Simpson, Deleuze and Theology, 95. 336 Religion, for Badiou, is the 'tethering of being to the One.' See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans.
Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), 23. This work contains Badiou's most explicit atheistic
pronouncements. 337See, for example, Ishay Landa, "True Requirements or the Requirements of Truth? The Nietzschean
Communism of Alain Badiou," International Critical Thought 3, no. 4 (2013); Bruno Bosteels, "Nietzsche,
Badiou, and Grand Politics: An Antiphilosophical Reading," in Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith
Ansell-Pearson (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 338 Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans. Norman
Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 22-26. 339 Central to Badiou’s mathematical ontology are the axioms of an actual (intead of a potential) infinity
and of the null or empty set that has no elements, which he refers to as the ‘no-thing’ of the void.
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multiplicity;’340 in his words, ‘the One is not.’341 Although he sees in Continental
philosophy’s Kantian obsession with finitude an ongoing, if unacknowledged, desire for
an inexpressible – and hence religious – transcendence beyond the finite realm, infinity, in
Badiou’s system, is liberated from theological associations and becomes ‘secularised.’342
Mathematics, Badiou claims, invites us to think of infinity separately from its collusion
with the One and instead to consider it in a banal way in strictly numerical terms:
That the infinite is a number is what a set-theoretic ontology of the manifold finally made
possible after centuries of denial and enclosure of the infinite within theology’s vocation.
This is why the ontology of number is an important item in the secularization of the
infinite. Indeed, it is the only way to be freed from both religion and the Romantic notion
of finitude.343
Crucially for Badiou, based on his understanding of the void set, nothing and being are to
be thought together. The void is a ‘no-thing’ and so, he believes, ‘there is a being of
nothing.’344 This insight drives his rejection of the possibility of God as an absolute infinite
being beyond the actual infinite multiplicity of being qua being.345
I should note that Badiou’s radically atheistic thought has not evaded the interest of
Christian theologians, and some thinkers argue that there is, after all, the possibility of
retrieving from his project a hidden affirmation of a God who is beyond the conditions of
ontological predication and the association with a supreme being, such that God might be
considered as hidden in, or even equivalent to, the void of the empty set.346 Such an idea
340 Alain Badiou, Theoretical writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum,
2004), 39. 341 Badiou, Being and Event, 145. For helpful introductions to Badiou's adoption of set theory in the
context of his philosophical assault on religion, see Kenneth A Reynhout, "Alain Badiou: Hidden
Theologian of the Void?," The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 2 (2011): 223-27; Fabi Gironi, Naturalising
Badiou: Mathematical Ontology and Structural Realism (Cardiff: Cardiff University Press, 2013), 9-33;
Frederiek Depoortere, Badiou and Theology (London: T & T Clark, 2009), 11-21. 342 Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 45. 343 Badiou, Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, 124. 344 Badiou, Being and Event, 54. 345 Hallward believes that no one has taken the death of God as seriously as Badiou. See Peter Hallward,
Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 7. 346 For a fascinating exploration of this theme, see Reynhout, "Alain Badiou: Hidden Theologian of the
Void?," 229-31.
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finds an echo in the intriguing and highly unconventional philosophy of Badiou’s student,
Quentin Meillassoux. Echoing Simone Weil’s suggestion of an identity between God’s
absence in the world and a divine form of presence, Meillassoux develops a whole
philosophy of what he calls ‘divine inexistence,’ using the notion of Contingency to signal
the un-grounding of being where Weil had spoken of the mystery of God’s darkness.347
Meillassoux's counter-intuitive speculations about God and religion, which find expression
in his notion of God’s inexistence, offer some of the most provocative and thought-
provoking ideas within contemporary Continental philosophy of religion.348 Meillassoux's
intriguing thought, along with the concealed religious dynamics that have been detected in
the work of even the most resolute of atheist thinkers, demonstrate that contemporary
radical philosophical atheism need not be beyond some forms of theological appropriation
and that such work may yield religious significance.349
1.10 Concluding remarks
Before moving into the central sections of this thesis, within which the dogmatic and
apologetic discourse associated with three selected interlocutors will be explored, it may
be helpful to summarise the characteristics of atheism as it has been analysed in the
foregoing discussion. These remarks will need to be borne in mind as the thought of Jüngel,
Hart and de Lubac is examined in some detail, particularly in connection with the atheistic
critiques that they engage with.
347 Stephanie Strickland, "Joined at the Hip: Simone Weil, Quentin Meillasoux," Religion & Literature 45,
no. 3 (2013): 227-29. For a much more critical assessment of Meillassoux's work, see Martin Hägglund,
"Radical Aatheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux," (2011). 348 Clayton Crockett, "Review of ‘After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency’ by Quentin
Meillassoux," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 71, no. 3 (2012): 251. 349 On the theological promise of some of the atheist writers considered here, see, for example: Spencer,
"The Religious Significance of the Atheist Conception of Life," 286-90; Depoortere, Badiou and Theology,
95-127; Simpson, Deleuze and Theology, 59-62; Davies, "Thinking difference: A comparative study of
Gilles Deleuze, Plotinus and Meister Eckhart," 76-86; Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-theological Thinking
in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux, 95-123.
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Firstly, it will have been evident that atheism is highly complex and heterogeneous
phenomenon that defies straightforward characterisation, and which has arisen in different
forms as a consequence of a variety of impulses during its long period of development. As
noted in the Abstract, my focus in this study is on Western expressions of atheism, which,
by and large, have emerged in opposition to the Christian faith. Within this stratum of
unbelief, the pluriform nature of atheism still needs to be recognised given the array of
factors that have led people either to reject or to distance themselves from Christianity:
lack of evidence for faith, the perceived nature of God, the experience of suffering, the
actions of the Church, social and cultural changes, alternative understandings of being and
so on. Even within the different categories of atheism outlined in this chapter, where
unbelief is rooted respectively in the head, the heart, the gut and the body, it must be
acknowledged that there is considerable internal diversity and none of these broad
groupings are reducible to a single position.
Recognising this variety is important in advance of the discussion that will follow in the
next three chapters in connection with the thought of my three dialogue partners, because
each of them engages with different streams of unbelief within the history of atheism. Thus,
although, in common with the other authors to be examined, Eberhard Jüngel devotes a
significant section of his major work God as the Mystery of the World to Nietzsche and the
notion of the death of God, his major concern is a dogmatic one, exercising tools of reason
to undermine the arguments traditionally associated with certain forms of Type I atheism,
notably in the thought of Descartes and Kant, particularly as it developed in response to
elements of Christian thought. He does this by critiquing the so-called God of metaphysical
theism (from which atheism is, he believes, an inevitable consequence), and also by
developing a new model of theological analogy that displaces the understandings of
analogy put forward by Aquinas, Kant and others. David Bentley Hart’s concerns are rather
different. His preoccupation in The Beauty of the Infinite is in unfolding the beauty,
goodness, joy, peace and infinity of the Triune God as a counter-narrative to the ontic
violence that he detects within the themes of immanence, difference and repetition that run
as strands through much Type IV postmodern philosophy in the wake of Nietzsche. In
Atheist Delusions he opens up a broader canvas, seeking to reassess the broad sweep of
Christian history and its relationship to Western civilisation in a positive way that attempts
to undermine the assumptions and prejudices which he encounters in the post-Christian
thought that suffuses Type III atheism. Henri de Lubac’s target is different again. For, in
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his key text The Drama of Atheist Humanism, his principal concern is with Type II atheism
as expressed by Feuerbach, Nietzsche and Marx.350 De Lubac does, however, share
important common ground with Jüngel in that both thinkers are attentive to the Christian
roots of atheism. Their focus is rather different, with Jüngel targeting the abstract God of
metaphysical theism, which has been postulated as a necessity for the world and for
humanity, whilst de Lubac’s major concern is with the rupture between nature and grace
in neoscholastic thought, which, he argues, led to theological extrinsicism and which paved
the way for the emergence of secularism, a ‘thinned-out’ or nominal religious faith, and
unbelief in a multitude of expressions.
A second theme that will have emerged in the discussion throughout much of this
opening chapter concerns way in which many atheist thinkers have struggled to genuinely
disentangle themselves from theological influences and Christian doctrines. A concealed
vein of theistic reasoning can be discerned in the rhetoric of unbelief, whether this in the
appeal to ultimate truth, in hierarchical structures of thought, or in reference to notions
such as creativity, goodness or awe, which betrays the Christian origins of Western atheism
and which highlights the parasitic relationship between unbelief and belief. Of course, as I
have noted, several authors have sought to demonstrate that some forms of Christian
thought or action are actually responsible for generating an atheistic response, so the
genealogical roots of atheism may, arguably, be traced, in some cases, back to the position
of the Church at different points in its history. In other instances, however, the shadow of
Christian thought may be buried rather more deeply, and theological motifs will, as a
consequence, be more subtly integrated within the case for unbelief.
Finally, at various points in this chapter, the resources that the plurality of atheistic
positions might present to Christian theology have been referred to. It is a contention of
mine in this thesis that the relationship between Christian theism and atheism need not
always be one of antagonism or confrontation. In denouncing particular understandings of
350 It should be noted that this characterisation is complicated by the attention that de Lubac also gives to
the thought of Comte and logical positivism, which might be thought of as an expressions of Type I,
reason-centred, atheism.
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God, or other doctrinal positions, through its critique of some modes of theological speech,
by justly criticising certain behaviours of the Church or by highlighting the need to think
again about certain topoi (such as being, creation, worldliness, art, and language) with a
new theological apparatus, I suggest that the atheist voice may be able to offer to the
Church a great service. Indeed, given its importance within contemporary culture, the need
for the Church to find a way to enter into conversation with unbelief is a pressing one. In
the final chapter of the thesis I will pick up this theme in seeking to identify several points
of contact around which a thoughtful and generous reception of some atheist viewpoints
might be developed. Whatever the merits of such an engagement, it is clear that atheism in
all its variety needs to be taken seriously by Christian thinkers and that the ministry and
mission of contemporary churches cannot flourish unless the arguments for unbelief are
attentively listened to, carefully considered, and that a spirit of constructive dialogue is
pursued.
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Chapter 2:
Perspectives on atheism in
the theology of Eberhard
Jüngel
2.1 Restoring the ‘thinkability’ of God
The work of Lutheran theologian, Eberhard Jüngel (b. 1934), offers a rich and important
resource for the exploration of, and the development of a constructive dialogue with,
atheism in the modern world. Jüngel examines the phenomenon of atheism in the context
of reflections upon the connection between the Christological and cultural understandings
of the death of God. Jüngel was fascinated with atheism, regarded it as an invaluable
starting point to provoke theological reflection and renewal, and gives the phenomenon
serious and extended attention in his key work God as the Mystery of the World, which has
received much critical acclaim. For Jüngel, God’s passage through death is the key event
that discloses God’s identity, provides the starting point for language and thought about
God, and acts as the locus of the correspondence between divinity and humanity. Jüngel’s
focus on the participation of God in the human experience of suffering and death provides
a key strand in his project and serves as an important theme for the Church to draw upon
as it seeks to engage with atheists.
Jüngel has no interest in notions of God as a ‘cosmic watchmaker’ who is detached from
and transcendent to the world. Rather, Jüngel’s attention, throughout his project, is focused
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on the God who interrupts the world and who profoundly upsets its actualities.351
Stemming from this conviction, it is the ‘word of the cross’ that provokes in Jüngel a
protracted engagement with theology’s foundational question concerning what we are
doing when we speak about God.352 This study leads him to enquire into the manner in
which the concept of ‘the death of God’ has been used in history, taking the idea as the
point of departure both for his engagement with atheism and for his critique of certain
Christian understandings of the doctrine of God.353
Following his exposure to the state-sponsored atheism of the East Germany he grew up
within, his close attention to the disinclination toward faith amongst large swathes of
Western society and his awareness of the growing reality of religious pluralism, Jüngel is
highly sensitive to the challenge that those who lack belief pose to Christian theology.354
Jüngel also encountered unbelief within his own family as his elder brother, Rainer, was
an avowed Marxist and atheist. Thus, he recognises, with Martin Buber, that the word
‘God’ has, for many, been denuded of meaning: ‘What word of human speech is so
misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this!’355 Within both the history of Christian theology
and in the dependent phenomenon of modern atheism, Jüngel detects a core principle of
thought, which states that God is inaccessible to human thought. God is either an
351 R. David Nelson, Jüngel: A Guide for the Perplexed, First edition. ed. (London: Bloomsbury T&T
Clark, 2019), 2. 352 Jüngel's concentrated focus on the relationship between God and death in much of his writing has led
Alan Lewis to describe him as the theologian of the grave of Jesus Christ. Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross
and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 2001), 255; Mueller
believes that Jüngel has provided the best critical analysis of the history of the concept of the death of God
in modern philosophy and theology. David L. Mueller, "God As Revealed Mystery," Perspectives in
Religious Studies 2 (1981): 156. 353 In each context, Jüngel invites his readers to revisit notions of God that have become ossified in
religious language and cultural discourse and thus to effect a re-visioning of what he refers to as the
‘thinkability’ (Denkbarkeit) of God. 354 For Jüngel's autobiographical sketch of the theological and cultural influences that shaped his thought,
see Eberhard Jüngel, "Toward the Heart of the Matter," The Christian Century 108, no. 7 (1991). 355 Eberhard Jüngel, "What Does it Mean to Say, 'God is Love'?," in Christ In Our Place : The Humanity of
God in Christ for the Reconciliation of the World: Essays Presented to James Torrance, ed. Trevor A.
Hart, James Bruce Torrance, and Daniel P. Thimell (Exeter: Paternoster, 1989). Jüngel is here citing Martin
Buber, Eclipse of God : Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy, ed. Roger Paden (New
York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 15-18.
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inconceivable and thus inexpressible object of faith or is thought of merely as a relic of a
now-vanished religious disposition and so is rejected as unreal.
I should note that Jüngel is unwilling to hastily denounce atheism. He takes very
seriously the current of disbelief in the modern world, seeing it as both an indictment of a
misplaced Christian theism and as the opportunity for the renewal of theology. In probing
the question at stake in the dispute between theism and atheism, he seeks to ‘understand
atheism better than it understands itself’ and to unfold the ‘moment of truth within
atheism.’356 And so in his theological project, Jüngel attempts to question the intellectual
unattainability of God by highlighting the intimate connection between God and humanity
in the form of God’s identification with the crucified man, Jesus. Jüngel uses the term
Entsphrechung (correspondence) for this mediation between the mystery of God and the
realm of humanity. Indeed, divine-human correspondence lies at the heart of Jüngel’s
efforts to develop a linguistic account of God.357 Jüngel’s particular interests are with the
varieties of atheism that emerge from the application of reason and logic, particularly
within the history of Christian metaphysical thought, and atheism that is driven by rebellion
against God, especially as this is encountered in the thought of Feuerbach, Fichte and
Nietzsche. With respect to the typology I outlined in Chapter 1, Jüngel’s engagements with
unbelief are associated with Type I and Type II categories of atheism. He has little to say
about Type III and Type IV atheism.
2.1.1 Jüngel’s theology of the cross
The rethinking of divinity within the world that Jüngel places at the heart of his theology
stems from his conviction that God is to be seen in the crucified Christ who freely enters
the transience and perishability of the world in order to bring life to humanity. Jüngel’s
project is thus a contemporary theologia crucis, which focuses on the death of God as the
material centre of dogmatic theology. For Jüngel it is an axiom that God defines himself
356 Jüngel, "Toward the Heart of the Matter," 230. 357 See Archie J. Spencer, The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God's Speakability (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity, 2015), 242-43.
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when he identifies with the dead man Jesus. This is a central element in Jüngel’s theology
and, because it counters the notion of a God who is remote and inaccessible, it provides
the Church with an important starting point as it seeks to develop a dialogue with atheists.
Jüngel’s most sustained treatment of God’s identification with the crucified Jesus and
thus with temporality, perishing, and death, is to be found in his major work God as the
Mystery of the World, published in 1983.358 Atheism, particularly as it emerged in response
to the idea of God as an abstract metaphysical proposition within the history of Christian
theology, is a central theme of this work and receives considerable attention from Jüngel.
It is a complex and dense text within which Jüngel oscillates between critical and
constructive material. He draws on a large array of concepts from previous philosophical
and theological literature, weaving these sources together with a number of strands of his
own thought, but granting his readers neither a clear outline map nor a systematic summary
of his conclusions. Nonetheless, the work is an important and original contribution to the
crowded field of writing on subjects such as God’s passibility, the place of Christian faith
in the modern world and the nature of theological language. As DeHart has noted, the focus
achieved in the work concerns the conversation between the ‘modern “death of God,” with
its own origins in Christian faith’ and the ‘theological “death of God,” represented by the
Christ event.’359 In the work Jüngel opens up the question of responsible human speech
and thought about God on the basis of the humanity of God. By selecting a number of
significant figures in the history of Western thought, he seeks to trace the emergence of
God’s inconceivability for many people today, linking this closely to the arguments that
have been assembled to demonstrate the necessity of God. In reaction against this
intellectual trajectory, Jüngel demonstrates God’s knowability on the basis of the facticity
358 Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified
One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism, trans. Darrell L. Guder (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
Originally published in German as Gott als Geheimnis der Welt : zur Begründung der Theologie des
Gekreuzigten im Streit zwischen Theismus und Atheismus (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1977).
Hereafter, the work is referred to as GMW. 359 Paul J. DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God: Trinitarian Faith and Philosophy in the Thought of
Eberhard Jüngel (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 9.
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of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.360 Jüngel’s focus on God’s presence in the historical
figure of Jesus as ‘the Crucified One’ is at the heart of his response to atheism.
2.1.2 The God who comes into the world
Jüngel’s doctrine of God centres on God’s advent in the world. The revelation of God is
the self-communication of God’s being, a being that is love and which embraces in freedom
that which is human. Indeed, reflecting the debt he acknowledges to Barth, Jüngel rejects
the premises of natural theology, which, in his view, seek to speak about God apart from
the event of his revelation. So, although Jüngel engages with the philosophical tradition,
he consistently holds that metaphysical injunctions that posit the necessity of God based
on a priori predicates of divinity have, in fact, led to the denial, rather than the affirmation,
of God’s presence in the world. On the basis of the biblical testimony, Jüngel sees God as
fully present in the revelatory word of address and is therefore accessible as an object of
thought to humanity. God’s historical revelation makes God known as the God of event.361
God’s being is, then, for Jüngel, in his becoming, in motion from eternity, through a
dynamism that stems from the primal decision to effect reconciliation with humanity. This
address to humanity is through the Son of God who journeys into the ‘far country’ of this
world’s suffering and into the dark world of death.362 Such a perspective provides a
valuable theme in Jüngel’s project that the Church can draw upon as it seeks into dialogue
with atheism.
In his project, particularly in God as the Mystery of the World, Jüngel focuses on the
presentation of a hermeneutical counterproposal to the unspeakability of God. Although
Jüngel accepts the biblical precedent of God’s hiddenness,363 he seeks to contradict the
360 GMW, 328. 361 See Roland Daniel Zimany, Vehicle for God: The Metaphorical Theology of Eberhard Jüngel (Macon,
GA: Mercer University Press, 1994), 81-3. 362 Jüngel provides a lucid 'paraphrase' of Barth's theology in his examination of God's dynamic presence in
the world as an expression of God's trinitarian being. Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God's
Being is in Becoming, trans. Horton Harris (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1976), 1-3. Hereafter,
this work is referred to as DT. 363 For example, ‘No one has ever seen God.’ (John 1.18a)
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traditional understanding of words as signs and proceeds toward a new way of thinking
about God based on the principle, which has an equally strong biblical warrant, that God
himself has made himself accessible.364 As such, he works out a theological counter-
movement against the Latin tradition that seeks to think of God and of thought itself in a
new way, which will query again the linguistic meaning and function of the word ‘God.’
The word ‘God,’ Jüngel asserts, must signify something beyond language because there is
some existing thing which exists only or chiefly in the word event. Thus, for Jüngel, words
can allow something to happen and in the case of the word ‘God’ it is ‘a note of the
presence of a thing.’ God himself is understood as the Word and so language, in Jüngel’s
project, has functions other than signification. One of its essential functions is that of
address, which is a form of signification.365 This, then, provides the foundation for Jüngel’s
argument in God as the Mystery of the World as he seeks to counter both abstract notions
of God that are associated with God’s incomprehensibility within the classical
metaphysical tradition and the dismissal of God as unthinkable by atheism.366 It is a
programme that must deal head on with the problem of contemporary atheism because ‘the
question of the thinkability of God can be dealt with seriously today only from that
perspective.’ In other words, in confronting atheism, Jüngel believes that the problem of
the speakability of God, and of the humanity of God, can be discussed only in constant
reference to the possibility of an understanding of God which proves itself in the death of
Jesus.367
364 ‘It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.’ (John 1.18b) 365 GMW, 11. 366 The feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson is in agreement with Jüngel about the role that classical
theism and metaphysically-grounded notions of God, which are modeled on the pattern of an earthly
monarch and which view God as a Supreme Being, have played in encouraging much nineteenth- and
twentieth-century forms of atheism. For the God so conceived is repudiated as an alienating projection of
human consciousness. Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological
Discourse (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2002), 19-20. 367 GMW, 14.
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2.2 Metaphysical theism as the harbinger of
atheism
Jüngel gives a great deal of attention to the emergence of atheism as an outcome of the
history of Western Christian thought. He holds that modern atheism has its roots in the
twin principles of God’s necessity and inconceivability, which gain expression in the
medieval principles of theological analogy and divine simplicity. These philosophical
conceptions generated a notion of God’s necessity that turned out to be highly precarious.
And as such they laid the platform for the disintegration of metaphysical theism which was
inaugurated by Descartes and unfolded in the thought of Kant, Fichte and Feuerbach before
the pronouncement of the ‘death of God’ by Nietzsche. An examination of this trajectory
of thinking will provide the platform for a discussion of Jüngel’s countermove, which,
following Hegel and Bonhoeffer, is to take the concept of the ‘death of God’ as a means to
express God’s identification as the Crucified One. This becomes the central idea in his
theology of revelation and his conception of the humanity of the God who is the mystery
of the world.
2.2.1 The inaccessible perfection of God
Jüngel’s engagement with the classical understanding of God’s nature is a crucial aspect
of his attempt to foster a rethinking of who God is and how we receive him in thought and
speech. This is because Jüngel seeks to unearth the roots of contemporary disbelief within,
rather than outside of, the Christian tradition. His concern is that the postulates of absolute
superiority and perfect simplicity in the divine being, which the Western Christian tradition
inherited from pre-Christian philosophy, prohibited the very qualities that he reads as
central to the biblical revelation of God’s nature: becoming, proximity (to humanity),
transience and love. God, instead, has been conceived traditionally in terms of static
properties of substance (or essence) such as infinite superiority, self-dependence,
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immutability and the absolute identity of being and thought.368 ‘The perfection of God
required by the law of metaphysics forbade imagining God as suffering or even thinking
of him together with one who was dead. [This is] the basic aporia into which European
theology has blundered.’369 Jüngel holds that the long-standing metaphysical principle, that
‘the finite cannot comprehend the infinite,’ which, as we shall see, was to form the basis
of Fichte’s rejection of the knowability of God, can, more generally, be applied to the
aporia of theological epistemology which classical notions of divine perfection bequeathed
to modernity. For Jüngel, the principle of divine independent absoluteness, which he
regards as axiomatic for a philosophically-founded theology, is thus the contradictory
breeding ground for unbelief in God. Thus, modern ‘talk about the death of God is a
meaningful but inauthentic expression of the impossibility of continuing to think God,
postulated metaphysically… the expression “God is dead” is the paradoxical code word
for the beginning of the end of metaphysics.’370 This is an important point for the Church
to draw out from Jüngel’s thought in its task of developing a dialogue with atheists.
2.2.2 Cartesian epistemology and the erosion of God’s necessity
To follow the trajectory in Jüngel’s thought between classically-framed notions of God’s
necessity, yet unknowability, it is necessary to consider his engagement with the thought
of René Descartes, the seventeenth-century philosopher and scientist who so profoundly
unsettled Western conceptions of theological epistemology. For Jüngel, it is Descartes who
sets in motion the ineluctable disintegration of the medieval ideas of God’s being and who
inadvertently authors the death of God in modern thought and in doing so prepares the way
for the emergence of modern atheism. For Jüngel, Descartes makes audacious claims
concerning the reality of God that ground his essence in the thinking ego and fatally erode
authentic Christian conceptions of God based on the biblical testimony of revelation. As
368 GMW, 52. 369 GMW, 39. 370 GMW, 203.
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MacIntyre has remarked, ‘the God in whom the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came
to disbelieve had been invented only in the seventeenth century.’371
The auspicious step that Descartes took in the direction of contemporary atheism
involved the crowning of the human ego as the self-securing foundation of knowledge.
This move followed his drive to determine a solid foundation for truth about the world.
The pursuit of an unshakable basis for the human thinking self (the cogito) was itself driven
by Descartes’ adoption of methodological doubt in order to discard means for knowledge
of reality that could not be proven to be secure. The human ego itself, in the act of thinking,
became, for Descartes, the unshakable foundation for truth: cogito ergo sum. In the act of
thinking the self recognises itself (‘I think myself thinking’) and so the essence and the
existence of the self become equated. As Jüngel notes, this discovery parallels the classical
model of divine simplicity. The ‘Archimedean point of certainty’ has been reached
whereby the ‘existence and essence of the human person as being [are], in fact, one and
the same.’372 The problem that arises, however, is the perdurance of human subjectivity.
For the equation of existence with thought is necessarily true only in the moment of
thinking. The ego is thus constantly thrown back to the ‘zero point’ of thinking his being
anew. The certainty of one’s own existence does not guarantee continuity of this certainty.
And so, in order to secure the continuity of the ego, Descartes invokes God, the perfect
being from whom everything comes, as the guarantor of truth.373
In this way, God becomes a methodological necessity, logically guaranteeing the
continuity of the cogito. Consequently, the argument for God’s existence becomes
dependent on the human being and its capacity to think.374 Although in classical Christian
thought God is the condition of the possibility of human thought, for Descartes God is
contingent upon the intellectual activity of the ego and so human subjectivity, both
ontologically and epistemologically, becomes primary to, rather than dependent on, that
371 Alasdair C. MacIntyre and Paul Ricœur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1969), 14. 372 GMW, 115; see also DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 51. 373 GMW, 115-17. 374 Spencer, The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God's Speakability, 250.
105
which is beyond it. As Jüngel puts it: ‘Part and parcel of the stringency of the Cartesian
approach is the idea that God is necessary for the human “thinking thing.” Therefore, we
can understand that Descartes understands God as a necessary essence, as a ‘necessary
being’ (ens necessarium),’375 although it could be argued that this makes human thought
dependent on God and not vice versa. Such a God must also be utterly superior to the ego
as the most perfect essence. For only the perfect divine being is able to eradicate the doubt
that is the signature of human thought. Jüngel interprets Descartes’ thought here to suggest
that the notion of God’s perfection stems from the perception of imperfection within the
thought apparatus of the human ego. The idea of God that is intrinsic to human thought is
that perfection which fulfils the lack of perfection discerned by the cognitive processes of
the cogito. The recourse to the absolutely perfect God, inherited from classical
metaphysical theism, makes necessity the fundamental category of divinity upon which
Cartesian logic stands.376
It is this methodological necessity, with its positioning of an absolutely superior God as
an epistemological guarantor for the ego, that Jüngel sees as paving the way for the crucial
blow to the proper conception of Christian faith. Jüngel’s precise focus is on the
disintegration of the essence and existence of God in the Cartesian metaphysical
framework. This is because the cogito ergo sum requires a fundamental distinction between
the existence of God, who is proven to exist beyond doubt as ‘present with me’ (the
guarantor of the continuity of the ego) and the perfect essence of God, who, ‘as the infinite
substance, independent, omniscient, omnipotent, [is] absolutely superior to me.’377 In
Descartes’ system of thought, existence is equated with being ‘present to mind.’ And so,
because of the strategic necessity of God in securing the coherence of the ego’s self-
reflection, the thinking ego, which has become the measure of all things, becomes the place
of God’s presence. In this way, God is made dependent on human thought and human
subjectivity has, consequently, made God’s existence a necessity. However, the God upon
which the human subject is dependent is defined in terms of lack of defect and ultimate
375 GMW, 119. 376 DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 51. 377 GMW, 124-25.
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perfection. The essence of God required by the ego has the attributes of transcendence,
perfection and absolute power. For this reason, Cartesian thought forces the concepts of
the divine essence and the divine existence to move in opposite directions.378 This is
carefully expressed by Jüngel in this way:
(a) In that the essence of God is represented by me, the existence of God is secured, the
existence of God is secured through me.
(b) With regard to his essence, God is almighty Creator, who is necessary through himself
and through whom I am…
(c) In terms of his existence, however, God is through me, in that his existence can be
understood as representedness through and for the subject, which ‘I’ am.379
In this way, the notion of divine simplicity, which Descartes inherited from scholastic
metaphysics, becomes eroded and with it the necessity of God is fundamentally
undermined. Hence, for Jüngel, ‘this proof of the necessity of God is the midwife of
modern atheism.’380 God is above man but can only exist through man.381 The human ego
has therefore been positioned between the existence and essence of God. Thus, Descartes
exploits the rational distinction that had been postulated in scholastic thought between the
existence and the essence of God. And so, the intellectually conceived God that, in
Descartes’ conception, can only exist because of human thought, is banished as God.382
For Jüngel, the transcendent God is, in effect, replaced by an immanent one, who is
‘appropriate only to humanity. For, in Cartesian thought, the disintegration of the being of
God is ruptured into a ‘highest essence over me and into its existence through me and with
me.’383 Paradoxically this leads to the loss of God’s necessity, which is the very opposite
of Descartes’ intention. For once God had been established in this contradictory way at the
378 DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 53. 379 The quotation appears in the way that Jüngel has organised it. GMW, 125. The translation used here is
that of Paul DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 53-54. 380 GMW, 19. 381 Joseph Palakeel, The Use of Analogy in Theological Discourse: An Investigation in Ecumenical
Perspective (Roma: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1995), 168. 382 Spencer, The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God's Speakability, 250. 383 GMW, 126.
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outset of modernity, and as humanity found itself able, in matter of fact, to conceive of
itself without God, the removal of God was inevitably to follow. ‘Descartes secured the
existence of God in such a way that it necessarily had to lead to the destruction of the
concept of God and of the metaphysically grounded certainty of God.’384 This
epistemological development at the start of the modern era sets in train the progressive
dismantling of Christian faith and the corresponding emergence of contemporary atheism.
In summary, Jüngel’s reflections on the necessity of God are of crucial importance for
his understanding of both theism and atheism. Jüngel traces the notion of God’s apparent
necessity back to René Descartes’ belief in God as a ‘necessary being’ (ens
necessarium).’385 The Cartesian approach makes God necessary for the human thinking
thing (res cogitans). God, for Descartes, is necessary as the essence which is more perfect
than man, and proceeds in his attempt to provide proofs for God, all of which are connected
to an idea, not of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ within the domain of history, but in
human consciousness. The proof that Descartes believes he has demonstrated in his
ontological argument has insured the continuity of human existence.386 Jüngel is
unconvinced by Descartes’ logic, which founds faith on the necessity of God, and argues
that ‘the Cartesian securing of God for the purpose of providing assurance for the human
ego had to lead to the disintegration of certainty about God.’387 As a consequence, Jüngel
poses the question about whether Descartes’ understanding of God as the highest power is
totally defective.
384 GMW, 111. 385 GMW, 119. 386 GMW, 120. 387 GMW, 122.
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2.3 The emergence of the idea that God is
dead
The Cartesian demonstration of God’s necessity, in order to secure the continuity of the
thinking subject, led to a contradiction in thought. For in proving that the God which the
cogito knows to exist is over me as an absolutely superior essence, the “thinking I” has
ruptured the simplicity of God and disintegrated the divine being. Jüngel saw that this
contradiction had inevitably to lead to the removal of God as God in Western thought:
‘[T]o the extent that God, as an absolutely superior highest essence, cannot be limited to
presence within the dimension of my present existence, he is already disappearing.'388
Jüngel seeks to trace the fate of God’s fragile place in European consciousness and the
surfacing of atheism as a legitimate, even necessary, response to the inheritance
bequeathed to modernity by classical metaphysical theism. He plots the course from
agnosticism about what or who God is like, through the gate of intellectual doubt and onto
outright denial of God’s existence. He does this in a highly selective way by focussing his
attention on key figures in nineteenth century German intellectual thought: Kant, Fichte,
Feuerbach and Nietzsche. In these thinkers, humanity has become detached from divinity,
no longer finding itself to be understood on the basis of God and therefore finding God to
be strictly unnecessary. They each share the idea of a philosophically conceived God as
‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived.’389 They adopt different strategies but
they each conceive of divinity in terms of the modern self-grounding of God in the cogito,
the thinking self, and each thinker, ultimately, destroys the concept of God understood as
the unity of essence and existence. In God’s place, humanity takes on the qualities of
divinity through the defiance of thought and will. This trend represents what Jüngel
describes as ‘hue of inwardness,’ which for him characterises European philosophy after
Descartes.390
388 GMW, 126. 389 This is the famous statement of Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). It formed the basis of his so-called
ontological argument and was adapted by Descartes in his own demonstration of God’s existence. 390 GMW, 71.
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2.3.1 Kant’s conception of the unknown God
In mapping the impact of the metaphysics of subjectivity on Christian faith, Jüngel
identifies Immanuel Kant as pivotal to the process of ushering in the ‘death of God’ in
modern intellectual consciousness.391 In this section I will therefore examine Jüngel’s
reading of Kant’s dense thought as this pertains to the question of human knowledge of
God. The thinking subject’s engagement with objective reality was examined by Kant in
his Critique of Pure Reason of 1781. Jüngel asserts that Kant presupposes the Cartesian
self-grounding of thought in the proposition ‘I think’ and that this is expressed in his
fundamental proposition of the synthetic unity of apperception.392 This notion involves the
reception of sensory data pertaining to objects external to the mind by a mental apparatus
of a priori categories (such as time, space and causality) that is internal to the mind. The
mind therefore has a rational organisational structure that orders and processes empirical
sensory information on the basis of universally held concepts. In order for objects to be
known, sensible perception corresponding to the phenomena (or appearances) of those
objects must occur.393 All knowledge has its origin in experience of real objects although
the active mind has a critical transcendental function in processing inbound data and
securing this knowledge. Non-empirical concepts, such as the abstract ideas of justice,
freedom, eternity and God can be thought by the intellect. So, despite Kant’s prohibition
against direct knowledge (or ‘cognizability’) of non-objective concepts, he does not contest
God’s thinkability and regards God as a legitimate object of thought.394 However, because
these concepts are not connected with experience, they are empty and do not constitute
knowledge. For this reason, Kant concludes that God is not knowable through sensible
intuition.395
391 There are two interconnected facets of Kant’s work which Jüngel regards as particularly important in
corroding authentic Christian faith and thus in the establishment of an impasse in the human conception of
God. These are, firstly, the epistemological revolution, which disassociates thinking and knowing, and,
secondly, his linguistic-hermeneutical model, which becomes evident in Kant’s understanding of analogy. 392 GMW, 129. 393 In this way the Kantian model of knowledge represents a continuation of the Cartesian grounding of
thought in the thinking subject or cogito. DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 57. 394 GMW, 130. 395 GMW, 131.
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Kant reaches the conclusion that God may be thought by turning to the empirical
consciousness of the ego’s existence. He asserts that, although sensory data can yield
knowledge of external objects, the intuition of the thinking self itself (the ‘I’ in ‘I think’)
is not possible.396 Kant secures the certainty of the self, which is not available through
intellectual intuition, to the ego’s relation to external things. Jüngel recognises that this is
a move that inverts Descartes’ grounding of the certainty of knowledge in human
subjectivity in response to the methodological doubt concerning external objects. With
Kant, the realisation of the ego’s identity is bound to the integration of sensory perceptions
by the cogito. For Kant, the synthesising of sensory data within the organisational
apparatus of the ego is possible because of the three a priori ideas of pure reason which
govern the ego’s function. In addition to sense itself, these ideas include the orderly cosmos
and God. Kant’s concept of God is therefore developed in a struggle with theoretically
indispensable doubt regarding the thinking self. 397 Kant makes a postulate of the God that
he cannot know.398 He further developed his notion of God’s necessity as an intellectual
postulate in the second part of his triumvirate, A Critique of Practical Reason, where God
serves as a point of orientation for the moral function of humanity.
2.3.2 The impossibility of conceiving God in Fichte’s thought
Kant’s ambivalence in seeking to disassociate thought from sensible intuition was to be
exploited by Fichte.399 Fichte had become embroiled in the ‘Atheism Dispute’ of 1798,
which was triggered by the publication of his book On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine
World-Governance. In this work, Fichte had dispensed with the convoluted intellectual
396 Only through the coordination of the multiplicity of sensible inputs through the unifying synthetic
apperception of the ego is the thinking subject able to intuit itself. 397 GMW, 131. 398 This he expresses in the famous statement from the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure
Reason: ‘I therefore had to annul knowledge in order to make room for faith.’ Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, ed. Unified Edition (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 1996), 31. 399 The German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 – 1814), was a founding figure of German
Idealism, which developed from the philosophical an ethical thought of Immanuel Kant. Fichte made
particularly important contributions to the notion of self-consciousness or self-awareness, and to the triad
of ideas, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, which are used to explain the dialectical method of Hegel.
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pattern of Kant’s epistemology and asserted that God could simply not be grasped. And
because he conceived of substance as a category defined by presence in time and space, he
had proposed the logical impossibility of conceiving God as a substance possessing ‘being.’
He also denied the possibility of thinking of God as ‘outside the world’ (or, in Kant’s terms,
in the ‘noumenal’ realm) for such a location undermines the infinity of God.400
Fichte was not an atheist and he did not dispute the actuality of God.401 However, he
did contest the possibility of any possible conception of God. He did not accept Kant’s
adoption of analogy as a means to speak of God because all forms of thought and language,
including his own understanding of thought as a schematising act, represent a form of
limiting and grasping.402 Jüngel suggests that Fichte’s rejection of thought about God is
derived from the contradictions in Kant’s thought whereby the differentiation of
knowledge and thought dissolves: ‘The paradox that the supersensuous schema always
falls short of the truth which it grasps is related to the fact that we basically apprehend
everything comprehended in the first supersensuous schema only through our sensory
capacity to represent things (our power of imagination).’403 Fichte clarifies the ambiguity
of Kant’s epistemology and so draws from it the only logical conclusion, that God is
fundamentally inaccessible to thought.404 Fichte sought to preserve and protect the deity of
God by rejecting the possibility of speaking of the existence of God. In so doing he is
actually advancing an anti-idolatrous position that is in line with much classical theism. As
Jüngel recognises, this position had been expressed in Augustine’s well-known statement,
si comprehendis non est Deus.405 And so Jüngel sees Fichte’s engagement with the
Atheism Controversy of 1799 as leading to a philosophical translation of Augustine’s
position. For this reason, Fichte is a thinker that Jüngel is able to support. Thus, Fichte’s
400 DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 59. 401 He was, however, dismissed from his post as Professor of Philosopher at the University of Jena in 1799
following a charge of atheism. 402 Thus, as Jüngel notes, ‘[t]he either-or has proved to be a neither-nor. Nothing leads to God… God
cannot be thought at all.’ GMW, 137. 403 GMW, 138. 404 GMW, 139. See also DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 60-61. 405 ‘if you comprehend, it is not God.’ Sermon 52. Jean Grondin, "Augustine’s ‘Si comprehendis, non est
Deus’ – To What Extent is God Incomprehensible?," Analecta Hermeneutica 9 (2018).
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understanding that God is not thinkable is, Jüngel believes, not a statement against God
but for God.406
2.3.3 Feuerbach and the anthropological essence of faith
If the self-grounding of thought asserted by Descartes, Kant and Fichte was to have a
crippling impact on Christian faith, Feuerbach was to deliver the critical blow. Building on
the notion of emancipated subjectivity, Feuerbach attacks the thinkability of God by
claiming that all thought of divinity is, in effect, no more than the fantasy of humanity.
Inverting Anselm’s so-called ontological proof of God (‘that than which nothing greater
can be thought’) as a statement about the limit of human thought, Feuerbach seeks to turn
theology into anthropology.407 Jüngel regards him as taking the decisive step in separating
talk of the death of God from its original Christological significance and using it in the
sense of an atheism which undermines the Christian faith.408 He holds that Feuerbach,
along with Nietzsche, develops a form of atheism that trades on an inauthentic identity
between Christian theology and philosophical theism.409 The position Jüngel holds here
must be distinguished from that expressed by Barth, who accepts the validity of
Feuerbach’s critique of ‘religion,’ although he claims that Christianity, grounded in divine
self-revelation, is improperly identified as a human religious project and is, as a result,
largely immune from Feuerbach’s critique.410 As Bender notes, Barth is not especially
threatened by atheism for he sees it not as a new and unique threat to Christianity in the
modern era, but as a recent variation of a very old problem, that of idolatry. For this reason,
Barth addresses atheism not on its own terms, but places it in a subcategory of religion,
406 GMW, 139. 407 DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 61-62. 408 GMW, 100. 409 Its presupposition is that God’s essence is regarded as a counter-concept to the essence of humankind. J.
B. Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 81. 410 Barth outlined this position in his section on religion in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics
entitled ‘‘The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion.” Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Vol. I, Part
2, trans. G. T. Thomson (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1963), 280-361; Barth's discussion of Feuerbach's
critique of religion is contained in the introduction he wrote for Feuerbach's key work. Karl Barth, "An
Introductory Essay," in The Essence of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1854).
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which he regards as a form of self-righteous idolatry, and which is, in fact, a form of
unbelief.411
By contrast, Jüngel’s engagement with Feuerbach centres on Feuerbach’s assertion,
‘[o]nly when thy thought is God does thou truly think,’ which appears in the work The
Essence of Christianity.412 In this phrase Feuerbach holds that everything implied by the
word ‘God’ should, instead, be asserted of man. In this way religion can be returned to its
anthropological essence. In his philosophy of reason-will-heart, which is developed in this
text, he treats God as the ‘essence of understanding, as moral essence (or law) and the
essence of the heart.’ Each of these three human capacities reflect the human thought of
divinity through the process by which thought intensifies and magnifies itself. Reason is
unable to escape from itself and obtain a purchase on the supposedly transcendent being
of God. Rather, the idea of God is the limit point of human thought, the highest state of
rational value.413 Whilst Feuerbach seems to be taking the opposite stance to that of Fichte,
Jüngel argues that, in fact, both thinkers arrive at a denial of the divine existence whilst
preserving the idea of the divine essence. Divine existence, for Feuerbach, is an illusion of
reason at its limit point. However, the concept of God as the highest and infinite being,
combining all perfections, had to be preserved by Feuerbach to realise his intention of
‘elevating the mortality of human existence.’414 For Feuerbach, God is non-existent. Yet,
simultaneously, the concept of God is the self-fulfilment of thought. The mystery of
theology has become mere anthropology.415
411 Bender, "Karl Barth and the Question of Atheism," 272-73. 412 GMW, 141. The quotation is from The Essence of Christianity, 36. 413 ‘God’ is the highest idea; that than which no greater idea can be conceived. Divinity is the pièce de
résistance of thought and is, therefore, a reflection of human reason alone.413 Instead of conceiving of God
as a separate being, Feuerbach argues that God is merely a category of our intellect. He therefore abrogates
the opposition between divinity and humanity. GMW, 143. 414 GMW, 151. 415 Again, then, the self-grounded human cogito inserts itself between the existence and essence and so
destroys the concept of the unity of God. This, for Jüngel, ultimately heralds the widespread disbelief in
God.
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2.3.4 Nietzsche and the death of God
A key theme within God as the Mystery of the World is the notion of the death of God,
both as a theological motif in relation to the death of Jesus Christ, and as a phrase that gives
expression to atheism and unbelief in the wake of Nietzsche as well as those who both
proceeded and followed him. In Jüngel’s analysis of the emergence of atheism in the
mindset of Western culture, Nietzsche is identified as a pivotal figure. Jüngel has a
thorough grasp of Nietzsche’s thought and recognises the profound influence of his work
in Western philosophy of religion. In part this reflects the close intellectual connection
between Jüngel and Heidegger, for whom Nietzsche was also a source of great fascination.
Jüngel, of course, follows a very different course in his understanding of God than either
Nietzsche or Heidegger. However, there are important areas of correspondence in the two
thinkers’ concepts of time, religious freedom and moral psychology.416 These fields will
not be considered here. Instead, this section will highlight the area of Nietzsche’s work that
is most closely related to Jüngel’s theme, namely the idea of God’s death.
It is in Nietzsche’s writing that the phrase ‘the death of God’ first appears as a metonym
for the loss of Christian faith.417 The notion of God’s death has a multivalent quality in
Nietzsche, encompassing meanings that include murder, suicide, abandonment and
sacrifice. The target, however, in each case is the metaphysical God of Christian theism as
supposedly ‘proved’ by variations of the ontological argument propounded by Anselm and
Descartes. This is the God of infinite superiority to humanity whose existence is pinned to
the activity of the ego’s ‘I think.’ And it is therefore significant that in an early reference
to the death of God Nietzsche notes that it is we who have killed him:
416 See G.O. Mazur, "On Jüngel's Four-fold Appropriation of Friedrich Nietzsche," in The Possibilities of
Theology : Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel, ed. John Webster (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,
1994), 60-69. 417 Although he was the son of a Lutheran minister, Nietzsche developed an intense hostility towards his
native religious upbringing and in his mature writings set out to demolish the basis of Christian faith. These
texts are subtle and complex, combining philosophical argumentation, invective, and rhetoric to provoke
both intellectual disbelief and moral revulsion with the Christian notion of God. See Benjamin D Crowe,
"Nietzsche, the Cross, and the Nature of God," The Heythrop Journal 48, no. 2 (2007): 244.
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The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Where is God?’ he
cried: ‘I tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murders. But how did
we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the
horizon? What are we doing when we unchained this earth from the sun?418
Crucially, for Jüngel, the category through which Nietzsche’s madman declares God to be
non-existent is God’s location. For the question about where God is surfaces as an
inevitable source of doubt in the intellectual climate that followed the Cartesian insinuation
of the cogito between the existence and essence of God. Thus, for Jüngel, the ‘we’
implicated in the madman’s statement includes all those in the Western metaphysical
tradition who have sought to demonstrate the presence of God as a superior and
inaccessible being through the application of rational thought. Specifically, the Cartesian
security of God leads inevitably to the question ‘where has God gone?’ And this is a
development that results eventually in the cultural death of God: ‘Within the dimensions
of [Descartes’] “I think,” the metaphysical concept of God which has also defined
theology… has become progressively less conceivable and finally unthinkable.’419
Jüngel’s particular attention is directed to Nietzsche’s question ‘could you conceive a
God?’ where Nietzsche questions God’s very thinkability.420 The basis for Nietzsche’s
dismissal of God centres on the notion that God is the conjecture of infinity, conceived of
in classical thought as that realm surrounding human finitude. Nietzsche rejects the concept
of infinity set in opposition to finitude. The idea of God is fatally tied up with the
intolerable superiority of an unreachable and incomprehensible infinity. He seeks to
replace such a ‘bad’ notion of infinity with a ‘good’ revision of the concept based on the
limitless thrust of the human creative will.421 Envisioned through Nietzsche’s figurative
Superman, the human will is capable of a self-intensification and the rehabilitation of the
infinite. And in its emancipated role as master of the universe, humanity is able to ‘wipe
418 See Lucy Huskinson, The SPCK Introduction to Nietzsche: His Religious Thought (London: SPCK,
2009), 32-35. The passage quoted is from The Gay Science, 125. 419 GMW, 126. 420 GMW, 127. The quotation is taken from Thus Spake Zarathustra, from the section "In the Happy Isles,"
XXIV. 421 DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 64-65.
116
away the horizon’ of the infinite God and itself assume the position at the limit of thought.
The death of God, then, is the ‘setting aside of a fixed oppositeness between finitude and
infinity.’422 For Nietzsche, God is understood as absolutely infinite and can therefore not
be conceived by finite reality; God’s otherness abrogates thought.423 In the post-Christian
world that Nietzsche heralds, God, as an alien height superior to human thought, is
dethroned and replaced by the finitude of restricted human thought, which, in turn,
magnifies human essence into an insatiable source of generative power. When humanity
comes to itself in this way, all connection to God is severed and divinity, for Nietzsche,
must die. Atheism, then, is the ironic consequence that Nietzsche reached as he followed
through to its conclusion the pattern of thought founded on the apparent proof of a
necessary yet absolutely unreachable God.
2.4 Thinking through the death of God
The formula ‘the death of God’ highlights, for Jüngel, the aporetic juncture reached by
modern thought in its engagement with the content of theology. The phrase has become a
metaphor for the extinguishing of Christian faith within large sections of Western society
and, in turn, for the phenomenon of atheism. Instead of a reference to the passage of God
through death in Christ, the words have been adopted as an anti-Christian slogan. In this
section, the way in which the statement has been used in Christian theology and philosophy
will be examined and consideration given to how Jüngel regards the Christological notion
of God’s death as a starting point for engaging with the challenge presented to Christian
faith by contemporary atheism.
422 GMW, 147. 423 Christopher Holmes, "Revisiting the Doctrine of the Divine Attributes: In Dialogue with Karl Barth,
Eberhard Jüngel and Wolf Krötke," (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 102.
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2.4.1 The meaning of the statement
The demonstration of God’s necessity as an unknowable essence through the operation of
Cartesian subjectivity is implicated by Jüngel in the emergence of modern atheism.424 This
arose through the self-grounding of the ego and the conception of the divine essence as
absolutely superior to humanity. And because the God so conceived is ultimately
unknowable, the God whom Descartes requires as a guarantor of the doubting cogito’s
continuity becomes the God who, in the end, is not needed. In Jüngel’s mind, the
dissolution in faith unwittingly triggered by Descartes and then Kant reached its
denouement in the German philosophical tradition. Feuerbach took the decisive step in
separating talk about the death of God from its Christian roots and propelled the formation
of an atheistic orientation.425 Nietzsche subsequently delivered a vicious indictment of the
Christian faith and ushered in the words ‘God is dead’ as a mantra for the postmodern loss
of belief.
Jüngel seeks to engage seriously with these critiques of Christianity, reading in them a
pointed attack on the classical theism that he too seeks to undermine. For this reason, he
implores faith to work through the particula veri (grains of truth) of atheism in order to
confront the aporia associated with the concept of God which, in fact, finds its origin inside
the Christian tradition.426 Theism and its twin, atheism, have fundamentally misconceived
the nature of the divine essence by ignoring the encounter of God with death as
ontologically decisive. Thus, for Jüngel, the touchstone for both a re-envisioning of
Christian theology and for Christian engagement with atheism is the crucifixion. This event
in the life of God permits Christian talk about death and divinity being found together.
Consequently, the ‘death of God’ is a central theme in Jüngel’s theological framework.
Repeatedly characterising the phrase as a dark statement, Jüngel understands that it points
both to the sharp critique of metaphysical theism that has emerged from a culture for whom
God is no longer thinkable, and to the reality of God’s participation in the event of a
424 This is because, by questioning the identity of the essence and existence of God, Descartes
problematises the essence of God. 425 GMW, 100. 426 GMW, 102.
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historical death on the cross which is central to authentic Christian faith. The philosophical
critique provides a resource for Jüngel in working out a genuinely Christian vision of God’s
presence in finitude, powerlessness, suffering and death. In the face of the bastions of
unbelief, ‘theological consideration of… the death of God must have both an historical and
dogmatic orientation.’427 Jüngel discerns a lineage in Nietzsche’s thought between the
crucifixion and emergence of modern atheism. And in this vein, he suggests that Nietzsche
recognised what many theologians failed to see, that the proclamation of the crucified God
ushered in the negation of deity.428
2.4.2 Luther’s notion of the crucified God
The influence of Luther on Jüngel’s thought is significant, for he sees in Luther’s
Christology the basis for a revision of the classical notion of the divine being.429 Luther’s
theologia crucis, with its emphasis on God’s revelation in hiddenness on the cross of
Calvary, is central to Jüngel’s conception of God’s penetration of the human predicament.
In the metaphysical tradition’s a priori dismissal of change and perishing as predicates of
God, Luther discerns a tendency to confuse the nature of God for all that is not God and to
call non-divine that which really is God.430 For Luther, human reason is unable to assail
the mystery of God as the absconditus Deus. Indeed, even in Christ, God is revealed as
hidden, concealed within suffering and humiliation and so found in all that is regarded as
least godlike.431 God is present on the cross but in a way that defies human conceptions of
the divine presence. So, even in the crucifixion, God is concealed in his revelation, making
himself known only through suffering, both of the sinner and in Christ,432 to those who are
427 GMW, 45. 428 Jüngel, "Toward the Heart of the Matter," 230. 429 GMW, 41-42. 430 Eberhard Jüngel, The Freedom of a Christian: Luther's Significance for Contemporary Theology
(Augsburg Fortress Publishing, 1988). 431 ‘He wants to be found in Christ, but must “hide”… in order to fly below our radar which is set for what
we take to be “spiritual” things above.’ Steven D Paulson, "Luther on the Hidden God," Word and World
19 (1999): 369. 432 Alister E. McGrath, Luther's Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther's Theological Breakthrough
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 150-52.
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confronted by the abject poverty of their personal soteriological capacity.433 The theologia
crucis is, then, a programmatic and Christologically focused theology of revelation that
finds its centre in death.434 God is, thus, present only as the absent One, grasped only by
faith, for his essence is interwoven with nothingness as articulated in the crucifixion.435
Luther’s imprint on Jüngel is seen in the positioning of the cross at the centre his
theological project.436 And, like Luther, Jüngel is adamant that the Christian faith cannot
be understood or held to be plausible without offering to the world a picture of God’s union
with the wretchedness of death.437 Within his theologia crucifixi Jüngel draws on Luther’s
Alexandrian Christology with its robust doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum (the
exchange of attributes) between the human and divine natures of Christ.438 This allows
Jüngel to speak of Christ’s death as integral to the being of God. The resurrection is seen
by Jüngel as the confirmation of God’s identification with humanity in the abandonment,
isolation and death of Jesus on the cross. And in the raising of Jesus from the grave God is
revealed as being present in the event of Christ’s death.439 He uses the logic of the
communicatio, which is so central in Luther’s theology, to assert that the suffering and
death undergone by Jesus truly belong to God.440 On the cross God enacts his being and is
thus, in Jüngel’s thought, identified with the Crucified One. For Jüngel, ‘God’s life does
not exclude death but includes it’ and, as such, God vanquishes death ‘in that he took death
with himself into that life which he, God, is himself.’441 On occasions, Jüngel goes further
and has stated that not only does God identify with the crucified Jesus, he is to be
433 Thus, for Luther, ‘true theology and knowledge of God are found in Christ crucified.’ Martin Luther,
"Luther's Werke im WWW (Weimarer Ausgabe)," (2000): 1.30.30-31. 434 Thus, a true understanding of God is possibly only through the execution of Christ. See Jaroslav Pelikan
(ed.), 55 vols., Luther's Works (L.W.), (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1957), 31.52. 435 Jüngel, The Freedom of a Christian: Luther's Significance for Contemporary Theology, 31, 33. 436 He concurs with Luther in asserting that it is not possible to speak about God aside from the ‘incarnate
God’ and the ‘human God.’ GMW, 37. 437 Eberhard Jüngel, Death, the Riddle and the Mystery, trans. Iain Nicol (Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press,
1975), 113. 438 Johann Anselm Steiger, "The Communicatio Idiomatum as the Axle and Motor of Luther's Theology,"
Lutheran Quarterly 14 (2000). 439 GMW, 363. 440 Ivor J Davidson, "The Crucified One," in Indicative of Grace - Imperative of Freedom: Essays in
Honour of Eberhard Jüngel in his 80th Year, ed. R. David Nelson (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 38. 441 GMW, 220, n.65.
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considered completely unified with him. ‘The living God and the dead man are
identical.’442
2.4.3 Hegel’s contribution to the debate
Within Continental philosophy, Hegel remains the outstanding thinker of the death of God
and he has been a major influence on much German theology both within the Protestant
and the Catholic Church.443 Jüngel identifies the enormous significance of Hegel in
providing a ‘philosophically conceived theology of the Crucified One as the doctrine of
the triune God.’444 Furthermore, in tracing the demise of faith in God and by establishing
the Christ event as the ‘death of the divine,’ Hegel has, for Jüngel, provided an important
resource for theology in connecting the originally Christological theme of God’s death
with the epistemological problem of contemporary atheism. Thus, Jüngel credits Hegel
with initiating the philosophical treatment of the relationship between God and death
within the context of theology’s engagement with atheism. ‘The systematic connection of
the Christological source of the idea of the death of God with the epistemological-
metaphysical problematic of modern atheism could be Hegel’s most significant
achievement for theology.’445
The death of God is an enduring theme in Hegel’s writings. However, his most
frequently-cited reference to the concept is expressed at the end of his long essay on
Enlightenment thought, Faith and Knowledge.446 In this work Hegel argues for the unity
of God with radical otherness and introduces his concepts of the ‘Calvary of the Absolute
442 Jüngel, Death, 108. See Davidson, "The Crucified One," 38. 443 Barth had wondered why Hegel had not been accorded the status in Protestant theology similar to the
position occupied by Thomas Aquinas within the Roman Catholic tradition. Karl Barth, Protestant
Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1973), 370. 444 GMW, 94. 445 GMW, 97. 446 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1977). The work was originally published in 1902.
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Spirit’ and the ‘speculative Good Friday.’447 Jüngel plays close attention to this text,
highlighting the critique Hegel is offering of philosophical rationalism in relation to the
question of God, the participation of God’s being in the historical movement of thought,
and the meaning that the ‘absolute Passion’ holds for understanding the divine nature.
Hegel disputes the finality of the alternative between the human ‘I think’ and a God
whose essence is absolutely superior to this thought. However, as God is considered to be
the identity of thought and being, Hegel holds that God’s essence is present in the
negativity of thought itself. For this reason, as Jüngel points out: ‘This negativity of thought
would then, if it were not thought to belong to God himself, mean that God is nothing for
thought.’448 And so, in Hegel’s ‘true philosophy of the Absolute,’ the inconceivability of
God is shown to be just a moment of the supreme Idea.449 For Jüngel, Hegel’s
understanding that God is dead is an event in the self-negation of God.450 God does not
wish to abandon the world in finitude and so sacrifices himself, giving himself up to
destruction. The sacrifice is the outcome of the Incarnation, which leads inevitably to the
cross. Yet, in Hegel’s true philosophy of the Absolute, it is not the man who dies but the
divine. He thus wants to understand the death of Jesus as expressing the death of the divine.
In the Incarnation it is God that became man and so it is God as God who is involved in
the total turning towards death. ‘God has submitted himself to death to that which was
most alien to him and now he bears the mark of mortality in himself.’451 This is the
Absolute Passion or Speculative Good Friday which reproduces the atheistic feelings of
the modern age within the course of the life of God. Jüngel sees this as the decisive point
447 ‘But the concept or infinity as the abyss of nothingness is which all being is engulfed, must signify the
infinite grief [of the finite] purely as a moment of the supreme Idea… Formerly, the infinite grief only
existed historically in the formative process of culture. It existed as the feeling that ‘God Himself is dead,’
upon which the religion of more recent times rests... By marking this feeling as a moment of the supreme
Idea, the pure concept must give philosophical existence to what used to be either the moral precept that we
must sacrifice of formal abstraction. Thereby it must re-establish for philosophy the Idea of absolute
freedom and along with the absolute Passion, the speculative Good Friday in place of the historical Good
Friday.’ Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 190-91. 448 GMW, 70. 449 GMW, 70. 450 GMW, 74. 451 GMW, 78.
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when the engagement of God with finitude enters philosophical thought.452 And so, for
humanity, the ‘infinite grief’ and ‘unhappy consciousness’ that characterise the ‘feeling
that God is dead’ become conduits for the in-breaking of truth. These feelings are like the
dark night of the soul through which emerges in the Calvary of the absolute Spirit a purified
conception of God.453
In Hegel Jüngel encounters a philosophical perspective on his own conviction that God
is God as he is involved in the total turning of himself to the temporality of history. And
in this turning to history – and so to the plight of humanity – God becomes a reality that is
subject to perishing. The ‘unending’ bears in itself the harshness of the fate of mortality.454
Only in this way can the fault line between finitude and infinity be crossed. This is the
speculative Good Friday that Hegel speaks of, the self-humiliation of divine being, which
empties itself of itself so that the separation between God and humanity can be ended. The
conception of the death of God is thus reconciled with Christianity. Luther’s dogmatic
insight is made fruitful so that the crucifixion of Jesus becomes decisive not just within the
context of his life but also as a criterion for understanding the divine being: ‘God has died,
God is dead – this is the most fruitful of all thoughts, that all that is eternal, all that is true
is not, that negation is found in God; the deepest sorrow, the feeling of something
completely irretrievable, the renunciation of everything of a higher kind are connected with
this.’455 In identifying himself with all that is foreign to his nature, negation is negated by
God, the death of death is accomplished and the ‘infinite grief’ assumed by God himself.
Hegel spells this out as the death of God. As Jüngel notes, Hegel repeatedly refers to the
‘feeling’ that God is dead. Hegel seeks to show that this feeling can be transformed into
the most profound of all thoughts. The cross is the very event through which God realises
himself and thus death is sublated into the infinity of divine life.456
452 GMW, 75. 453 Gary D Badcock, "Hegel, Lutheranism And Contemporary Theology," Animus 5 (2000): 148. 454 GMW, 78. 455 GMW, 88-92. The quotation is from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel: Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition, The Lectures of 1827 (Oxford University Press, 2006), 91. 456 William Franke, "The Deaths of God in Hegel and Nietzsche and the Crisis of Values in Secular
Modernity and Post-secular Postmodernity," Religion and the Arts 11, no. 2 (2007): 217.
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2.4.4 ‘We live without God:’ Bonhoeffer and the loss of faith
Within modern thought, Jüngel identifies Bonhoeffer as a notable successor to Hegel by
virtue of his efforts to integrate death into Christian theology. In Bonhoeffer Jüngel
encountered the theological re-assimilation of the notion of God’s engagement with
perishing that Luther had so forcefully expressed but which had subsequently been adopted
within philosophical discourse in an anti-Christian way. Furthermore, Bonhoeffer was to
contemplate the place of God in the crucifixion in the context of a high degree of sensitivity
to the erosion of Christian faith and religiosity in European culture. This was a trend that
Bonhoeffer was able to view through the lens provided by his extensive reading of the
work of Friedrich Nietzsche.457
Bonhoeffer was also attentive to the very same aporia in the conception of God that
Jüngel ascribes to post-Cartesian thought, the audacious attempt of the cogito to grasp after
God in order to be secure about its own existence. Thus, a recurring theme in Bonhoeffer’s
early writing is his identification of the tendency in human thought to assert the reality of
that which is beyond the mind’s jurisdiction. In his second doctoral thesis, Act and Being,
Bonhoeffer was to argue that thinking ‘lays claim to a meaning which it cannot give to
itself’.458 The ‘I’ cannot move beyond itself; it remains forever imprisoned in itself and is
unable to place itself into truth.459 With respect to theological enquiry, which concerns
itself with the reality of God, this epistemological condition creates a problem if the
premise of human thinking is ignored. The ‘main fault with theology,’ Bonhoeffer was to
state, is that it ignores its ‘particular province and limits.’460 It therefore seeks to move to,
rather than starting from, the reality of God. This notion correlates with Jüngel’s own
457 Frits de Lange, "Aristocratic Christendom: on Bonhoeffer and Nietzsche," in Bonhoeffer and
Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy, ed. Brian Gregor and Jens Zimmermann (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2009), 73-83. 458 Bonhoeffer, D., ‘Act and Being’, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (ed. Whitson Floyd, W. Jr.,
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996) Vol. 2 (hereafter DBW 2), p. 27. 459 DBW Vol.2, 39, 75. 460 DBW Vol.10, 424.
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understanding of revelation as interruption within the word-event, which brings God to
language.
Jüngel applauds Bonhoeffer for taking this situation of modern atheism as the
opportunity to develop anew a Christian conception of God which draws on a similar point
of orientation to Hegel. So, for Bonhoeffer, the engagement with atheism and the
development of an authentically Christian understanding of God are interrelated tasks. For
God cannot be thought of as God without attention to the world in its particular historical
situation.461 As Jüngel observes, Bonhoeffer finds it impossible to reverse the development
of the world to its maturity, and so our coming of age leads to a true recognition of our
situation before God. Bonhoeffer, then, saw in ‘religionlessness’ the dismantling of
something ultimately unhelpful and, indeed, that it marked a recovery of the truly biblical
God and thus a more faithful recognition of our situation before him. The religion that was
being lost was connected, in Bonhoeffer’s view, with metaphysical models of divine
presence, inwardness, subjectivity and individualism.462 And as these categories deny the
biblical view of God they are ultimately idolatrous.463 Bonhoeffer dared even to suggest
that it was God’s plan to encourage this aspect of growing human maturity:464 ‘God would
have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him.’465 For this
reason, Bonhoeffer is a key thinker for Jüngel and presents a vision of the Church that can
make a genuine and meaningful contribution to atheist-Christian dialogue. As Childs puts
it:
A church for others living out its vocation of service and solidarity in the theology of the
cross, sustained by faith and hope is equipped for participation in our pluralistic post-
Christian/post-secular world. It is free in faith to engage the complex ethical dialogue and
debate of our diverse societies with compassionate concern for life, freedom, peace, and
461 GMW, 57. 462 Godsey, J. D., The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 249. 463 Plant, S., Bonhoeffer (London: Continuum, 2004) p. 130. 464 Clements, J., The SPCK Introduction to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 46. 465 Bonhoeffer, D., DBW 8, p. 360, emphasis added. See also GMW, 59.
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justice; free to let discipleship be its most eloquent statement. It is called to be a beacon of
hope.466
2.4.5 Jüngel’s theology of atheism
In Jüngel’s deliberations on the death of God, a number of key lines of argument are
apparent. Firstly, Jüngel wants to suggest that the cultural appropriation of the phrase ‘the
death of God,’ in the wake of Nietzsche, and the associated phenomenon of atheism, have
an important role to play for Christian theology in assisting it to differentiate itself from
inauthentic conceptions of God. In this sense, Jüngel sees atheism as a key resource for
Christian theology as it seeks to contribute to the development of a dialogue with Western
atheism. Indeed, Jüngel regards atheism as possessing grains of truth and he engages in a
serious exploration of the thought of a number of important atheist thinkers. He certainly
agrees with the atheist conclusion that God is not to be deemed necessary for the function
of the world. Jüngel ‘attempts to show that “atheism” offers an invaluable critique of the
sub-Christian aspects of “theism,” and that in this way it points to a genuinely Christian
concept of God “beyond the theism and atheism.”’467 Secondly, the purposes of Jüngel’s
interactions with atheistic thought is primarily dogmatic rather than apologetic.468 He
writes for a Christian, rather than an atheistic, readership.
Thirdly, Jüngel places the slogan ‘the death of God’ within a clearly defined
philosophical dispute. He characterises atheism, and the theism upon from which he
believes it has been derived, as wedded to a particular conception of God that can be traced
back to Greek metaphysical thought. In particular, he is exercised by the question of God’s
essence and the way in which this is conceived in traditional lines of thought, both inside
and outside of the Church. His concern is with the a priori assumptions of the nature of the
466 James M. Childs, "Lutheran Theology and Dialogical Engagement in Post-Christian Society," in
Justification in a Post-Christian Society, ed. Carl-Henric Grenholm and Göran Gunner (The Lutterworth
Press, 2014). 467 Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology, 79. 468 For this reason, Jüngel engages with atheism in the context of his discussion on the nature, rather than
existence, of God, and he expends little energy seeking to demonstrate the ‘truth’ of the Christian
proclamation as a counter story to the atheistic narrative.
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divine being that inhabit both theistic and atheistic conceptions and which have been
decisively set by the Cartesian epistemological revolution in a way that is at odds with the
biblical testimony of God’s being. Fourthly, Jüngel’s discussion of God, particularly in
partnership with the thinkers that have been examined, Luther, Hegel and Bonhoeffer, is
used to frame his own constructive and systematic proposals for the re-thinking of God.
These, as will have been evident, centre on the self-disclosure of God in the perishability
of the human domain and, in particular, in God’s identification with the Crucified One.
And central to Jüngel’s vision of God is his non-necessity, a conclusion he shares with the
atheist critique. Atheism therefore forms a backdrop to a prescriptive theological project
that places God’s humanity at its heart.
2.5 Jüngel’s endeavour to renew Christian
theology
As I have noted, Jüngel seeks to advance a fundamental revisioning of Christian theology
on the basis of God’s self-communication made manifest in the death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ. I suggest that this is his principal contribution to the Church’s task of
developing a dialogue with atheism. He works out a comprehensive theology of the cross,
responding to Luther, Barth, the New Hermeneutic movement associated with Bultmann
and other German theologians,469 and in conversation with a number of key philosophers,
notable amongst them Hegel and Heidegger. He also offers a sustained critique of those
theological and philosophical enterprises that attempt to demonstrate the existence, or
determine the attributes, of God on the basis of intellectual enquiry apart from the biblical
narrative.
Jüngel’s quest is to locate thought about God solely in the wake of God’s revelation.
This is a complex theopaschite theology as Jüngel invites his readers to think of God and
469 The theologians associated with the New Hermeneutic movement were especially attentive to the
theological challenged posed by modern atheism. Nelson, Jüngel: A Guide for the Perplexed, 46.
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perishability together and so to associate the categories of nothingness and annihilation
with God in order that possibility can assume ontological priority over actuality. In the
remainder of this chapter I will provide an assessment of aspects of Jüngel’s theological
project, particularly as they relate to the central concern of this study, the Christian
response to the ‘death of God’ in modern culture. In God as the Mystery of the World,
Jüngel engages with the challenge presented to theology by contemporary atheism and the
associated linguistic displacement of God. Many of the remarks in this section will
therefore relate to this important work, although some reference will also be made to other
texts by Jüngel where they connect with the main themes within this work. The section
will underline the important contribution Jüngel has made to Christian thought as he seeks
to present a coherent argument about God within a deeply secular culture.
2.5.1 Jüngel’s interaction with atheism
Jüngel stands as a leading figure in the Protestant tradition in offering a serious-minded
engagement with atheism. As I have emphasised, he situates his longest work to date, God
as the Mystery of the World, in the dispute between atheism and theism, and he seeks both
to uncover the particula veri in the atheist critique of classical metaphysical theism and to
present a counter-move of his own based on the reconstrual of the death of God on
Christological grounds. In this section I will examine the interpretative lens Jüngel views
atheism through and make some remarks on the benefits and limitations of his approach
that stand in addition to comments on the subject elsewhere in this chapter.
Jüngel holds that modern atheism has its roots in the marriage between theology and
metaphysics which resulted in Christian thought separating God’s existence and his
essence and so consigning God to an unreachable realm that is totally separate from us.
The aporia of God’s unthinkability and unspeakability is traced back to the logical
distinction between essence and existence in scholastic thought, which was exploited by
Descartes in his efforts to ground knowledge of the human cogito. The consequent
silencing of God found expression in the apophatic tradition which was, for Jüngel, merely
a theological harbinger of contemporary atheism and the cultural notion of the ‘death of
God.’ It is Jüngel’s view that the metaphysical God of signification needs to be rejected.
He believes that this understanding of God is conceptually undermined in the thought of
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Fichte, Feuerbach and Nietzsche.470 Jüngel’s response is to reassess the modern world’s
rejection of God and argue that the notion of the death of God presents an authentic doctrine
of the divine being. He therefore seeks to reverse theology’s refusal to countenance the
truth of God’s engagement with death, which he contends led to the modern notion of the
death of God (as an expression of atheism) in the first place. Influenced strongly by both
Luther and Hegel, Jüngel seeks to reclaim the death of God as a historical event in the cross
of Christ.471
I believe that Jüngel’s analysis of the arrival of atheism in contemporary culture
deserves to be taken seriously. He offers one of the most detailed critiques of the
relationship between Christian theology and modern unbelief in recent Christian thought,
and his engagement with Descartes, in particular, is most interesting and provocative.
However, whilst his thought undoubtedly contains much of value to those exercised by the
matter of unbelief, it does not offer a complete prognosis of the predicament facing the
Church in contemporary culture, and the prescription he offers seems to fall short of a
compelling Christian vision that will persuade those who have left the Church. It may be
that questions of theodicy, the shortcomings of the Church and the demands of modern life
may be more significant than philosophical principles in accounting for contemporary loss
of faith.
It could also be that society is not as allergic to the idea of God conceived as absolute
and above us as Jüngel believes. Might it be that the emphasis he places on the identity
between God’s being and God’s becoming in history, nothingness and death, is more off-
putting than attractive to those for whom loss of faith in God stems from their own
encounter with suffering and death? Jüngel’s reading of Nietzsche in this regard is
particularly interesting. Jüngel believes that elements of Nietzsche’s thought can be
retrieved for Christian theology because, as an outworking of his thought about
Christianity’s philosophical inheritance, Nietzsche eschews the false God of classical
470 Philip A. Rolnick, Analogical Possibilities: How Words Refer to God (Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press,
1993), 210. 471 See, for example, GMW, xxii, 43, 48, 55-57, 66, 74, 93-96, 361-63.
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theism. However, as Giles Fraser has pointed out, Jüngel misunderstands Nietzsche here.
Nietzsche’s fierce rejection of Christianity was, in fact, driven more by intuitive,
psychological and moral motives than by rational argumentation.472 He was not especially
interested in arguments around the existence or otherwise of God. His atheism stemmed
from the fact that he could simply not tolerate the association between deity and weakness
represented by the cross. In post-modern culture, unbelief may not, in fact, be anti-theist
but, rather, involve the rejection of a certain kind of God, that is a God who is
metaphysically defined as abstract, distant and removed from human affairs. And so, as
Bolt has suggested, society may not be anything like as allergic to notion of the absolute
God as Jüngel believes.473
In contrast to metaphysically-conceived notions of God, which he believes to be
responsible for modern unbelief, Jüngel’s response to atheism is centred on his insistence
that God can only be apprehended as the one who comes into the world in his humanity.
Thus, Jüngel’s theistic reconstruction can only be understood when the fundamental
connection between his trinitarian doctrine and the notion of God’s suffering and death is
grasped. Jüngel’s trinitarian interpretation of God is as a free subject of God’s own being
who comes to humanity in language and in history as the Crucified One and who, as a
result, cannot be sought through metaphysical or ontological philosophical frameworks,
which only serve to make God unthinkable. ‘The atheism born out of modern philosophy
is a child of resignation.’474 To think of God’s essence and existence as united in God’s
worldly presence requires, Jüngel argues, to confront God’s union with perishability.
Theology must be ‘prepared to destroy the understanding of God as superior to us (supra
nos) in order to think God in the way that he has revealed himself in his identity with the
man Jesus’ and to ‘think of the relationship of God’s being and existence as being without
contradiction, in such a way as God and man can be together.’475 Although, as I have noted,
Hart and other theologians dispute the notion that in the crucifixion God, in his essence,
472 Fraser, Redeeming Nietzsche, 13-14. 473 John Bolt, "Review: God as the Mystery of the World," Calvin Theological Journal 21, no. 2 (1986):
254. 474 GMW, 185. 475 GMW, 187.
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suffers, for Jüngel, the Deus crucifixus destroys the notion of God’s impassibility. He goes
on to assert that in the ‘analogy of advent’ God has come to expression in the life, death
and resurrection of the man Jesus and, as such, history has been made a predicate of
revelation.476
The overall impression Jüngel’s staunchly cruciform theology provides is of thought
wedded to the Christian gospel and to the language of revelation, scripture, grace and faith.
However, despite his intention to engage with the concerns of an unbelieving culture, it is
not a project that particularly engages with voices, arguments and interests from beyond
the orbit of Christianity. Jüngel is concerned, primarily, with dogmatics rather than with
apologetics and this orientation perhaps accounts for the univocal tendency in his language
which lends a rather polemical tone to his writing.477 As has been the case with Barth, this
approach has led to the charge of fideism.478 Paul Janz picks up on this trait in Jüngel’s
writings, identifying him as a principal exponent of what he calls ‘tautotheology.’ This is
an intellectual stance to Christian thought and speech that is essentially self-guaranteeing,
self-enclosed in character and self-referential. Despite Jüngel’s strong rejection of the
suggestion that thought can precede faith, Janz accuses Jüngel of conceiving of the
theological enterprises as a noetic, mentally discursive, exercise in grammar and linguistics
that is, in fact, grounded in our cognitive faculty. This approach, Janz suggests, ignores the
appetitive category of desire and motivation that must characterise a theology that is
attentive to God in embodied life.479 In summary, Jüngel’s work has led to a sophisticated,
carefully constructed and imaginative set of writings but it is regrettable that these have
not, in the main, articulated a theology of the cross that has resonated with the non-
Christian world.
476 Geoffrey Wainwright, "Today's Word for Today III. Eberhard Jüngel," The Expository Times 92, no. 5
(1981): 133, 35. 477 Palakeel, The Use of Analogy in Theological Discourse: An Investigation in Ecumenical Perspective,
321; Rolnick, Analogical Possibilities: How Words Refer to God, 286. 478 Ivor J Davidson, "Crux probat omnia: Eberhard Jüngel and the Theology of the Crucified One," Scottish
Journal of Theology 50, no. 02 (1997): 177. 479 Paul D. Janz, The Command of Grace: Foundations for a Theology at the Centre of Life (London: T &
T Clark, 2008), 8, 9, 38-40.
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2.5.2 Jüngel’s doctrine of God
As has been noted, Jüngel’s understanding of God, and the manner in which he has made
himself known to humanity, is firmly grounded in Jesus Christ and, most particularly, in
Jesus’ death on the cross. Indeed, for Jüngel, there is no non-Christological doctrine of
God and he holds that all true knowledge of God is only to be located in Jesus Christ.
Reflecting his Lutheran Christology, Jüngel asserts that the cross reveals the true deity of
Christ and is the definitive ground of all Christian doctrine. This Christological
concentration in Jüngel’s thought marks a determined attempt to renew Christian theology
in the light of the gospel and thus to counter both conceptions of God grounded in generic
human rationality and the derivative trajectory of secularity, which has seen large sections
of contemporary society turning away from belief in God. Jüngel, for this reason, has
undoubtedly become one of the most creative voices in Protestant theology’s response to
atheism.
By rooting his conception of God in the Crucified One, Jüngel seeks to present, in Colin
Gunton’s phrase, an ‘ontology without metaphysics.’480 He offers a theistic vision that is
not rooted in a priori philosophical assumptions or generic anthropomorphic principles.
This involves the development of a doctrine of God that bypasses the so-called
metaphysical attributes of God (necessity, immutability, eternity, omnipotence etc.) and,
instead, seeks to ground our understanding of God’s nature on the biblical rendering of
God’s action in the world. God, so conceived, is a personal agent and is characterised as
merciful, righteousness and faithful. Additionally, a question needs to be raised about
whether Jüngel is, after all, able to jettison dependence on philosophical principles in
construing a doctrine of God. For the strong Christological focus in Jüngel’s doctrine of
God does introduce a number of problematic elements which appear to point to an
unacknowledged set of metaphysical assumptions that sit below his thought. These
presuppositions concern the relationship between God and the world and the manner in
which, in Jüngel’s Lutheran Christology, history, humanity and experience are related to
480 Colin E. Gunton, "The Being and Attributes of God: Eberhard Jüngel's Dispute with the Classical
Philosophical Tradition," in The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel, ed.
John Webster (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994), 12, n.9.
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the being of God. John Farrelly, amongst other writers, has detected in Jüngel’s notion of
God being constituted by relationship and suffering, a concealed metaphysical principle at
work in Jüngel’s thought which is that a later act can affect an earlier reality.481 Such
foundational matters lay Jüngel open to the criticism that his drive to demonstrate that God
is a more than necessary mystery within our world does, in fact, end up compromising
divine freedom by making the world a necessary condition for God. This theme within his
thought will be explored in following sections.
2.5.3 The suffering of God and persons
Of particular significance within Jüngel’s doctrine of the divine attributes, because of its
relevance to his engagement with atheistic thought, is the vexed question of God’s
participation in human suffering and death. Jüngel has unquestionably been helpful in
contributing to modern theology’s attention on the relationship between God and suffering,
for this theme is at the forefront of the concern of many both within and outside the church
in relation to faith in God. However, he frequently slips from describing God as identifying
with the dead Jesus to language that implies that God is identical with the Crucified One.482
This is a view that does not have a scriptural warrant and it introduces a confusing and
unhelpful dimension to his work.483 It is funded, as I have shown, by the strong influence
of both Luther and Hegel on his thought and he develops the idea in order to counter the
atheistic standpoint in contemporary culture which has emptied the word ‘God’ of
meaning. Jüngel seeks to present a case for the speakability and thinkability of God and so
respond to the loss of faith in the world today by proposing that God genuinely was
481 Farrelly John Farrelly, "Book Review: God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the
Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism," Theological Studies 45, no. 3
(1984): 562-63. 482 For example: 'Christian proclamation speaks of the event of the unity of God with the executed Jesus of
Nazareth.' Jüngel, GMW, 190. See also 190, 329, 363-64, 373, 385 and 388. It should be added that the
notion that God is united to the Crucifed One, rather than identical to him, is not necessarily theologically
problematic. 483 Farrelly, "Book Review: God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the
Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism," 562; See also Davidson, "Crux probat omnia:
Eberhard Jüngel and the Theology of the Crucified One," 174; John Webster, "Jesus in the Theology of
Eberhard Jüngel," Calvin Theological Journal 32 (1997): 58.
133
involved a human death at Calvary. Indeed, he wishes to restore the death of God as theme
in modern theology as the means to combat the aporia that has emerged in conceiving of
God, which he, in turn, traces to theology’s infatuation with metaphysical ideas of a God
who is supra nos.484 For Jüngel, the death of God must be understood Christologically as
the means by which God has taken up, and conquered, non-being into the divine life
itself.485 For the death of Jesus on the cross is the very basis of God’s advent: ‘The
incarnation of God is then immediately related to the death of Jesus Christ. It is not this
man who dies, but the divine…’486 Jüngel’s assessment of the relationship between the
cultural and theological readings of God’s death is one of the most interesting and
imaginative elements of his thought, particularly as it gains expression in God as the
Mystery of the World. It forms the basis of his riposte to both classical theism and modern
atheism and it forms the basis of his trinitarian vision of God as love.
For Hart and a number of other commentators, Jüngel’s efforts to tie God’s being to the
economy such that the very nature of divine reality is somehow constituted by Creature-
creation relations, most pointedly suffering and death, raises series ethical issues that may
undermine his efforts to assuage the doubts of non-believers. These critiques cast serious
doubt over the assumption in much contemporary theology that the response to an age for
whom the presence of evil has undercut belief in God – the so-called ‘rock of atheism’ –
is to emphasise the fellow-suffering of God through some form of soteriology of solidarity.
The outcome of such a conception of God is troubling. For the consequence of construing
God in the way that Jüngel advances is that evil becomes meaningful. Thus, if the
distinction between God’s immanent being and his presence in the world is collapsed, so
that God’s identity requires commerce with sin, pain, suffering, nothingness and death,
then, far from becoming our companion, God is merely a co-sufferer with us. Furthermore,
a God so-conceived would not only be a participant in but the author of suffering. ‘What a
monstrous irony it would be if, in our eagerness to find a way of believing in God’s love
in an age of Auschwitz, we should in fact succeed only in describing a God who is the
484 Rolnick, Analogical Possibilities: How Words Refer to God, 195. 485 GMW, xxii. 486 GMW, 77.
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metaphysical ground of Auschwitz.’487 Hart’s criticism might be a little excessive here and
it may be that a more conciliatory tone could have been adopted, which models the
constructive dialogue that needs to be developed between theists and atheists. A related
concern about Jüngel’s focus on the death of God has been voiced by O’Donovan, who is
exercised by the subordination of sovereignty in Jüngel’s conception of God. He highlights
the turn, throughout Jüngel’s theology, ‘from the all-powerful and immutable sovereign to
the suffering and truly dying servant.’488 By stressing God’s love as expressed in God’s
participation in perishing, God’s role in judgement and the upholding of justice is
minimised. For O’Donovan, Jüngel’s emphasis on God’s suffering undermines rather than
upholds the place of God in combatting the sufferings of God’s people.489
In addition to his reflections on the suffering of God, Jüngel also addresses the
problematic issue of human suffering, which for many is the basis for their rejection of
God. Unsurprisingly, Jüngel recognises that suffering is ‘the rock of atheism’490 and
acknowledges the incomprehensibility of suffering. ‘… it ought to be remarked with
clarity: Suffering is not understandable. Even the Christian faith cannot understand
suffering.’ Although the Christian faith leads to the hard fact that people on earth suffer
and although this very faith lives from a story of suffering, which is centred on Christ’s
pain, passion and death, the Christian faith does not by any means imply that suffering can
be understood.491 Jüngel grounds this observation in the thought of Luther, who argues that
original sin lies behind not only suffering but our inability to understand it. For Jüngel,
death is at work in suffering; it makes us helpless, as it did to Job, and must provoke from
us silence, a silence that grasps for, but can never quite obtain, words of protest, lament,
and comfort.492 Jüngel argues that theology cannot provide a satisfactory answer to the
487 David Bentley Hart, "No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility," Pro Ecclesia 11, no. 2 (2002):
192. 488 Leo J. O'Donovan, "The Mystery of God as a History of Love: Eberhard Jüngel's Doctrine of God,"
Theological Studies 42, no. 2 (1981): 270. 489 O'Donovan, "The Mystery of God as a History of Love: Eberhard Jüngel's Doctrine of God," 271. 490 Eberhard Jüngel, "The Christian Understanding of Suffering," Journal of Theology for Southern Africa
65 (1988): 8. 491 Jüngel, "The Christian Understanding of Suffering," 4. 492 Jüngel, "The Christian Understanding of Suffering," 5.
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question of why people suffer. Nonetheless, he does hold that God is passible and enters
into our suffering through Jesus: ‘The divine opposition against destruction and the
suffering that it brings activates the son of God and in the end leads him, the Son of God
himself, into the abyss of suffering.’493 This insight enables Jüngel to counter the path from
suffering to unbelief as he asserts that: ‘Faith in the God who infinitely suffers in Jesus
Christ and reveals himself in his suffering as love – this faith is capable of shaking the rock
of atheism.’494 It is unlikely that Jüngel’s thought on the issue of human suffering would
be convincing to those whose unbelief is grounded in the reality of evil and pain. However,
Jüngel does offer a Christocentric analysis of the problem that is theologically coherent
and, at least within the Christian tradition, meaningful.
2.6 Conclusion
In the foregoing discussion I have sought to demonstrate how carefully Jüngel has
examined the phenomenon of modern atheism, and I have highlighted the close connection
that he believes to exist between metaphysical theism, within which God is a superior being
who is removed from creaturely reality, and the rejection of God’s existence. The close
entanglement between atheism and theism is a matter that he is very sensitive to and he
makes a convincing argument for rejecting the simple binary opposition between these two
positions.
Tracing the emergence of Western atheism through the thought of Descartes, Kant,
Feuerbach, Hegel and Nietzsche, Jüngel perceptively points to the close relationship
between Christian thought and modern unbelief. This theme in his work is of crucial
importance to the Church as it seeks to better understand and engage with atheism. In
particular, Jüngel attends to the notion of the death of God, as discussed by Hegel and
announced by Nietzsche, and identifies in this proposal the basis of the atheism and
493 Jüngel, "The Christian Understanding of Suffering," 10. 494 Jüngel, "The Christian Understanding of Suffering," 11.
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unbelief that presently runs though Western culture. I believe that his analysis of atheism
is important, insightful, and illuminating and that it stands as a vitally important
contribution from one of Protestant theology’s leading thinkers to an issue that represents
a significant challenge to the contemporary Church. Jüngel’s counter-narrative, as I have
shown, is to revisit the death of God in Christological terms and to place great emphasis
on the engagement of God with the human predicament through God’s identification with
the life, suffering, passion and death of Jesus. Although hidden as the ‘mystery of the
world,’ Jüngel asserts that the revelation of God is to be encountered in the man Jesus and,
most particularly, in his embrace of perishability. It is in the death of Jesus, the Crucified
One, that Jüngel sees the revelation of God as the source of human salvation and the fount
of love for all people.
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Chapter 3:
David Bentley Hart’s
engagement with atheism
3.1 Theology in dialogue with unbelief
In this chapter I will examine the work of the American theologian David Bentley Hart (b.
1965) and consider the response that he offers to various expressions of unbelief as these
exist within contemporary culture and philosophical thought. Hart’s perspectives are
informed by his identity as a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He draws
extensively on patristic and medieval authors, particularly Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine,
Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas
and, amongst more recent work, von Balthasar and the thought of theologians belonging
to the Radical Orthodoxy movement, particularly Milbank. These influences lead Hart to
place significant emphasis on the transcendence of God, the notion of God as the source
of all being, the centrality of beauty and peace to the Christian vision, and on the
equivalence of divinity and infinity. In critiquing the arguments of New Atheists, the
rebellious atheism of Nietzsche and his disciples, the indifference towards religious belief
and practice that characterises contemporary secular culture, and the nihilism that he
believes is at the heart of much contemporary Continental philosophy, Hart engages with
the full range of atheistic categories that I discussed in Chapter 1 and provides for the
Church a number of important resources that can assist it as it seeks to develop a
constructive dialogue with the different forms of atheism and unbelief that are present
within contemporary society.
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3.1.1 Hart’s project
Hart’s most significant work is The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian
Truth.495 In this text, the atheistic currents running through the thought of Nietzsche,
Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and other thinkers are carefully weighed and critiqued in
advance of a lengthy dogmatic section, which unfolds a Christian understanding of Trinity,
creation, salvation and the eschaton. In Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and
its Fashionable Enemies,496 Hart begins by summarising and then refuting the arguments
set out by several New Atheist authors. Most of the work, however, consists of a series of
essays on the history of Western civilisation, which attempt to expose the fallacious
narrative concerning the supposed trajectory from ‘blind faith’ toward the liberating
resources of reason and science. In his work The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness,
Bliss,497 Hart’s dialogue with atheism and his concern to offer an alternative Christian
vision are worked out in more depth. Through articles, interviews and a short book, Hart
has also addressed the question of God and the problem of unbelief as these came into
focus following the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Boxing Day tsunami in south-east
Asia in 2004.498 As I noted in the Introduction, Hart has also recently published a work
that explores themes in Christian eschatology, That All shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell and
Universal Salvation,499 within which he challenges, somewhat controversially, the notion
of eternal perdition and advances a position that embraces universal salvation in a way that
echoes an important theme in the theology of Henri de Lubac.
495 Hereafter, this work is referred to at TBI. 496 Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies. Hereafter, the work is
referred to as AD. 497 David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2013). This work includes lengthy reflections on the human existence, awareness and happiness. 498 David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? (Cambridge: Eerdmans,
2005); "Where was God?: An Interview with David Bentley Hart," The Christian Century 123, no. 1
(2006); David Bentley Hart, "Tsunami and Theodicy," in In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, ed.
David Bentley Hart (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2009). 499 Hart, That All shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. Hereafter, this work is referred to
as TAS.
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3.2 Hart’s doctrine of God
Hart’s most systematic work of aesthetic theology, The Beauty of the Infinite, presents a
Christian doctrine of God centred on the act of creation. Hart’s central thesis is that the
plenitude of God’s love in the act of divine creation is apprehended through the human
experience of beauty. The central section of the work, which contains a lengthy dogmatica
minora, stresses the nature of God as being, the necessity of analogy in Christian
theological discourse, and the place of peace within a divine economy that is marked by a
plenitude of love. Throughout the book, Hart develops Gregory of Nyssa’s notion of God’s
infinity, which he holds to be the form of divine excess and not, as in much speculative
philosophy, qualitative dialectical negation. For Hart, divine infinity does not negate
human finitude but is the very fount of transcendent benevolence that embraces and
animates creaturely existence. Harts interest in and the emphasis that he places upon beauty
as an aspect of human experience, which points to the reality of God, is a central strand
within his project and represents one of the more significant resources that he offers to the
Church as it seeks to develop a dialogue with atheism.
3.2.1 The beauty and infinity of God
Hart’s rejoinder to the nihilistic and violent currents that pervade some strata within human
society centres on the impartation of the presence of Christ to human creatures by the Holy
Spirit. It is in this divine mission that the Church grounds its evangelical appeal to the
world and it is only in such a demonstration of love for humanity that salvation can be
understood. It is received by humanity, Hart argues, as a response not to disinterested
rationality but to desire. Indeed, the human desire for God, so powerfully articulated by
Augustine in his Confessions, is for Hart a signpost to the closeness of God to humanity.
For the gospel is founded on the assumption that the desire, which Christ evokes, is, at the
same time, a form of persuasion reborn as agape, expressed as peace, and summoning us
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through the intimation of beauty.500 Indeed, for Hart, the whole theological enterprise is
motivated and sustained by philokalia (the love of beauty) as we, as creatures, perceive
something of divine infinity in our encounters with beauty. In this sense, beauty must be
distinguished radically from the sublime, the narrative of which corresponds to the
dissolution of being and ‘the disintegration of radiant unity wherein the good, the true, and
the beautiful coincided as infinite simplicity and fecundity…’501
The forgetting of this notion of being in Western thought since the advent of modernity
has, Hart believes, led to the conception of being as a veil or an absence: ‘Being, no longer
resplendent with truth, appearing in and elevating all things, could be figured then only as
the sublime.’502 Unlike the beautiful, the sublime is unrepresentable and is intuited as
indeterminate and, indeed, as an abolition of beauty.503 Critiquing notions of the sublime
in Kant, Lyotard, and the contemporary French philosopher, Jacob Rogozinski, Hart reads
modern and postmodern notions of this concept as the postulation of an ‘untraversable
abyss,’ which seeks to eradicate the theological notions of transcendence and of infinite
eminence that see the creaturely order as participating in the divine fount of being.504 Hart
then identifies a number of narratives of the sublime. These include: the differential
sublime, or the sublimity of exteriority, which is asserted with the principle of difference,
the notion most closely associated in Continental thought with the work of Jacques Derrida
(and, in particular, with Derrida’s neologism, différance, which he uses as a signpost for
deferral of meaning that is at play within human language); the cosmological sublime,
within which, as argued by Deleuze, Foucault, and others in the Nietzschean tradition, the
unrepresentable beyond the immanent sphere is a form of ‘Chaos’ or disorder; the
ontological sublime of Heidegger and Nancy, which identifies being with the event of
appearance, and which holds that the apprehension of sublimity equates to the limit of
representation that is nothingness; and the ethical sublime, a conception of sublimity that
emerges from the experience of alterity in the face of the other, as set out in the work of
500 TBI, 2-3. 501 TBI, 44. 502 TBI, 44. 503 TBI, 44-8. 504 TBI, 45-52.
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Lévinas.505 In opposition to different narratives of the sublime in Continental philosophy,
which are unified by the sense in which the sublime is the intimation of the difference
between representation and the otherness beyond the limit of human experience and
thought, Hart posits a transcendent unity of being and the good, which lies at the heart of
human desire and our love of beauty. Beauty, rather than the sublime, is, for Hart, a key
attribute of God, who is the highest beauty. Indeed, experienced beauty is precisely the
way in which God utters himself.506
Beauty, for Hart, is both a source of goodness and enjoyment in its infinite variety for
humans in their contemplation of the divine. Beauty is associated with the particular and
concrete instead of the universal and abstract (the ‘sublime’); and it is something both prior
to and capable of evoking human response, as well as embodying difference and distance.
Divine beauty is closely associated in Hart’s thought with the infinity of God, where, again,
the Christian vision is presented in a way that undercuts postmodern conceptions of
unrepresentable sublimity: ‘The infinite God declares his freedom to appear, to act, to be
in the midst of that which his infinity comprises; he is the infinite who is not merely
boundlessly “sublime” but who – by virtue of being beautiful – goes where he will.’507
Infinity, for Hart, is not a negation of the world but its determination as divine gift in the
ongoing act of creation. Drawing on von Balthasar, Hart asserts that God holds all things
in his embrace and, despite being infinite is not without form. For, as Moses beheld the
form of the Lord (Numbers 12.8), creatures receive their being through their participation
in the infinity of God and, in so doing, share in the glory of the Trinity.
Hart’s understanding of the interconnection between divine infinity, beauty and creation
is grounded in his reading of Gregory of Nyssa. Following Gregory, Hart views creation
as an expression of the richness of God’s infinity, an outcome of divine plenitude that is
infused with the peace that flows from the utter simplicity of God; it is received before all
else as gift and as beauty.508 Being participates in the ‘infinite ontological plenitude’ of the
505 TBI, 52-90. 506 TBI, 178. 507 TBI, 212. 508 TBI, 249.
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divine life, for God can be both utterly transcendent and dwell within immanent reality,
the very presence that let his beauty pass before the eyes of Moses.509 In this context, Hart
refers to Augustine’s conviction, as expressed in The City of God (2.4.2).510 Augustine
states ‘the beauty in creation is a proclamation of divine beauty,’ developing this idea by
suggesting that that ‘the delightfulness of created things expresses the delightfulness of
God’s infinite distance.’511 Creation, for Hart, is the fullness of grace, the expression of
trinitarian love, which reveals the graciousness of God. It is, he is at pains to stress, without
necessity because creation adds nothing to God and ‘there might just as well have been no
creation.’512 In his sophisticated theological exploration of God’s attributes and gift in
creating the world, Hart seeks to offer an aesthetic vision of the Christian gospel that is
radically different from conceptions of God as abstract subjectivity or as an unexplicated
simplicity requiring an ‘exterior’ medium of determination.513
3.2.2 The analogical interval and human participation in God
Hart is concerned particularly with the relationship between the being of God and our being
as human creatures. Inevitably, this leads him to explore the question of the analogia entis,
which introduces an analogical interval into being itself, a relationship both of infinite
distance and immanent proximity between ourselves and the God who is ‘no being among
beings.’514 The analogy of being is a central concept in Christian metaphysics and for Hart
it is a luminous thread running through his project. Indeed, it is, for Hart, the only means
through which a metaphysics of participation can be unified with the doctrine of creation
within the context of trinitarian dogma.515 This is because it enables the utter difference
between human persons and God to be understood as an expression of divine
transcendence. According to this analogia entis, as Hart presents it, ‘being is said
509 TBI, 214. 510 Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1871). 511 TBI, 252-53. 512 TBI, 256. 513 TBI, 256. 514 TBI, 232. 515 TBI, 241.
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ultimately and fully of God, but is also – analogically – said of individuals; individuals do
not exist in the same sense as God (this would be univocity), but neither is their existence
utterly separated from the existence of God (this would be equivocity).’516 Thus, for Hart,
the transcendence of God is of a kind that speaks, to, from, and within the world;517 it is
thus both distant and near.518
Hart derives his understanding of the analogia entis from work of the German-Polish
Jesuit priest and theologian, Erich Przywara, who he holds in high esteem.519 However,
challenges to the analogy of being have been presented through several centuries of
theological and philosophical reflection, from authors that range from John Duns Scotus,
William of Ockham, Thomas Cajetan, and Francisco Suárez to Martin Heidegger.520
Countering criticism of Przywara’s work, Hart notes that the principle does not place God
and creatures under the more general and prior category of being, but that it is the
analogization of being in the difference between God and creatures. Indeed, the analogia
entis is the very subversion of a general and univocal category of being, of naïve categories
of natural theology and any simple ‘essentialist’ notions of what might be meant by the
word analogy.521 The doctrine, rather, is the means by which revelation can be
comprehended. For, it is only because in some sense creaturely being is analogous to divine
being that we are able to apprehend God in his disclosure of himself to the world. Creatures,
516 Daniel Colucciello Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-secularism and the Future of
Immanence, Paperback edition. ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 78. 517 Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-secularism and the Future of Immanence, 78. 518 ‘Every putatively meaningful theological affirmation dangles upon a golden but fragile thread of
analogy. It must be possible to speak of God without mistaking him for a being among beings, an instance
of something greater than himself. Between God and creatures lies an epistemological chasm nothing less
than infinite, which no predicate can span univocally… the modal disproportion between the infinite and
the finite renders the analogy between God and creatures irreducibly disjunctive.’ David Bentley Hart,
"God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo," Radical Orthodoxy: Theology,
Philosophy, Politics 3, no. 1 (2015): 6. 519 As was noted in the previous chapter, this is in sharp contrast to the assessment of the doctrine held by
Barth and Jüngel. 520 John R Betz, "Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part One)," Modern
Theology 21, no. 3 (2005): 367. 521 TBI, 241-2.
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for Hart, belong to God’s infinity.522 Analogy, in a theological context, for Hart, never
delivers an epistemic grasp of the divine or a framework within which God can be secured
through a taxonomy of concepts. Rather, analogy enable us to understand difference and
distance, within the created world, as categories through which the presence of God as ‘an
ever greater dissimilitude embracing every similitude’ can be apprehended.523
God, for Hart, is, of course, ‘not a being yet is; he does not belong to being, but is
being…’524 In contrast, finite beings are the analogical expression of God’s positive and
determinate infinite act of being, the act through which God pours forth his own being
kenotically into beings and in which God’s essence comes to be convertible with the
‘transcendentals’ (truth, beauty and goodness), which constitute points of participation by
finite beings in the infinite plenitude of God.525 God, then, is not limited in any way by the
ontological difference between infinity and finitude. Rather, as the actus of all beings. Hart,
again, refers to Gregory’s understanding of the infinite.526 Hart also draws on Gregory
Palamas, Augustine, and Nicholas of Cusa, who all emphasise the communicability of the
divine essence within the forma infabricata,527 which confers to creatures the beauty of the
Trinity such that it may be beheld through the light of God’s infinity that is interwoven
with the fabric of being.528 He also believes that Pseudo-Dionysius’ theological
enunciation of the ‘divine names’ constitutes a metaphysics of participation, ‘according to
522 The analogia entis is, for Hart, the pivotal Christian doctrine that allows the continuity between God
and creation to be understood and through which the divine glory can be discerned in the beauty and
goodness of the world. This is because God is the being of all things, who is the source of the ‘infinitude
plenitude of the transcendent act in which all determinacy participates.’ TBI, 242. 523 TBI, 314. Hart’s defense of the doctrine of the analogia entis has much in common with that of von
Balthasar, who integrates the analogy of being with the analogy of faith through an intrinsicist model of
nature and grace. According to von Balthasar, the order of creation (and thus the analogy of being) is
oriented toward the ontologically prior order of grace (and thus the analogy of faith). See Steffen Lösel,
"Love Divine, All Loves Excelling: Balthasar's Negative Theology of Revelation," The Journal of Religion
82, no. 4 (2002): 588-89. 524 TBI, 233. 525 TBI, 232-35. 526 ‘The God who is shows his glory not as the nimbus of otherness that dwells like a phantom glamor
about all finite things… but as quantity, kabod [abundance, honour, glory]. All that is finitely
apprehended… fills the distance as light, approach, proximity, and peace, because God gives his beauty as
an expression and weight that can be traversed.’ TBI, 236. 527 created forms 528 TBI, 237.
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which all things are embraced in being as in the supereminent source of all transcendent
perfections…’529
3.2.3 Divine impassibility
A central element of Hart’s doctrine of God is his conviction that God is impassible.530 In
line with other Orthodox theologians, notably Vladimir Lossky, Hart argues persuasively
that this ancient doctrine of divine apatheia is less to do with notions of a Hellenised and
abstract metaphysical deity or one that establishes a logical contradiction in Christian
theology between the divine essence and God’s revealed presence, than it is about the utter
fullness of God’s joy, the perfect boundlessness of his love and the very basis of our
salvation. For in God’s ‘everlasting immunity to every limitation, finite determination,
force of change, peril, sorrow or need,’ we encounter the trinitarian plenitude that is ‘the
Father’s manifestation and love of his goodness in the Son and Spirit.’531 Indeed, for Hart,
without an affirmation of the impassibility of the divine nature of the incarnate Word, no
theological sense can be made of the language of Christ’s sacrifice. To do justice to the
presence of God within history, in the Incarnation, passion and death of Jesus, does not, he
insists, imply that there is a change within the being of God or that suffering is endured by
God. Rather, as Cyril of Alexandria maintains, Christ ‘was in the crucified body
appropriating the sufferings of the flesh to himself impassibly.’532 The Incarnation in no
way involves God becoming alienated from himself. The notion, therefore, of impassible
suffering, which we encounter both in Cyril and Melito of Sardis, as well as in the
declaration of the Second Council of Constantinople (‘one of the Trinity suffered in the
flesh’), is not a conundrum or paradox but an explication of the biblical story of our
529 Assimilating mainstream patristic and medieval theology, he asserts that the Christian understanding of God is one that must hold fast to the notion of God as ‘…impervious to any force – any pathos or effect – external to his nature and is incapable of experiencing
shifting emotions within himself... [and that this is the] ground of Christian hope, central to the positive message of the evangel, not
simply an austere negation of thought, but a real promise of joy in God.’ David Bentley Hart, The Hidden and the Manifest : Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2017), 8.
530 Hart, "No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility," 185. This paper takes as its starting point the
statement of divine impassibility in the Epistle of James (Jas 1.17). 531 TBI, 354. 532 TBI, 356. Here, Hart quotes from the Third Epistle to Nestorius.
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salvation in Christ. It enables us to hold together the immutability of God’s essence with
the human suffering of Jesus. As the Logos became flesh, God’s participation in the affairs
of humanity is an act of self-divesting love, which manifests divine kenosis, which does
not constitute change or alternation in God. Indeed, Hart is adamant that ‘the juxtaposition
of the language of divine apatheia with the story of crucified love is… what makes the
entire narrative of salvation in Christ intelligible.’533 Because love is integral to the essence
of God and is there before sin, the cross, he maintains, does not determine divine love;
rather, it manifests it. This is because, Hart argues, God’s love is an infinite peace, which
needs no violence to shape it and no death over which it must triumph. ‘If it did, it would
never be ontological peace but only metaphysical armistice.’534
Hart’s understanding of divine apatheia brings him into conflict with those theologians
who understand God as subject to change and who, further, suggest that in participating in
history, most notably the crucifixion, God experiences suffering.535 These thinkers attempt
to assimilate the trinitarianism of Hegel, that is they ‘collapse the distinction between
God’s eternal being as the triune God and the temporary history of God’s unfolding
presence with his creatures as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’536 Such a position reintroduces
the ancient theopaschite heresy and turns it into a new orthodoxy.537 Hart’s particular issue
is with the developments in Lutheran trinitarian theology over the last few decades, most
notably as these find expression in the work of Jürgen Moltmann, Eberhard Jüngel,
533 TBI, 160. 534 TBI, 167. 535 Here, he is referring to a strand within recent and contemporary systematic theology which interprets
Rahner’s principle in a problematic way through an overemphasis on the identity between the economic
and immanent identity of God and, in so doing, supports the assertion that the revelation exhausts the
reality of God in himself. Gregory J. Liston, The Anointed Church : Toward a Third Article Ecclesiology
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 192-93. Liston highlight's Hart's oppostion to this move and also
notes Hart's rejection of the notion of a contradiction between the trinitarian theologies in the Western
church (emphasising unity) and the Eastern church (stressing multiplicty). 536 TBI, 157. 537 See Ronald Goetz, "The Suffering God: The Rise of a New Orthodoxy," Christian Century 103, no. 16
(1986).
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Wolfhart Pannenberg and Robert Jenson.538 All these authors acknowledge the impact of
Hegel on their thought, with Jenson describing his own project as reclaiming ‘Hegel’s truth
for the gospel.’539 Jenson himself is both surprised by and rejects Hart’s dismissal of
Hegel’s project and his influence on trinitarian theology,540 and is unapologetic about the
Hegelian elements in his own theology.541 Within the Reformed tradition, a similar
theological position on the question of God’s participation in human suffering is adopted
by Paul Fiddes,542 whilst, within a different ecclesial context, the Catholic theologian
Catherine LaCugna, articulates comparable views.543 These thinkers have, Hart believes,
fallen for one of the perils that can follow from those who seek to translate Rahner’s maxim
about the identity of the immanent Trinity and economic Trinity into fuller theological
discourse, namely the abolition of the distinction between God’s immanence within
himself and his gracious presence within history.544 Such a turn, he believes, is a calamitous
one for both Christian theology and the apologetic enterprise of the Church.545
Creation, Hart asserts, adds nothing to God and it is never a requirement that God must
create in order to determine his nature or being. ‘God is good and sovereign and wholly
beautiful…, possessed of that loveliest (and most widely misunderstood) “attribute,”
538 It should be noted that, despite the Hegelian tendency in much modern Lutheran thought, the trinitarian
theology of Luther himself is actually very close to that of both Lossky and Hart. For, Luther is careful to
safeguard the transcendence of God and maintains that God is not subject, in any sense, to change and
instability. For an insightful and lucid discussion of these matters, see Knut Alfsvåg, "Impassibility and
revelation: On the relation between immanence and economy in Orthodox and Lutheran thought," Studia
Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology 68, no. 2 (2014): 174-77. 539 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 169. 540 Robert W Jenson, "Review Essay: David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of
Christian Truth," Pro Ecclesia 14, no. 2 (2005): 235. 541 Stephen Wright, Dogmatic Aesthetics: A Theology of Beauty in Dialogue with Robert W. Jenson
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 103. 542 '... the conclusion seems inescapable that a loving God must be a sympathetic, and therefore suffering
God.' Paul S Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 17. 543 See, for example, Catherine LaCugna, God for Us: the Trinity and Christian Life (New York: Harper
SanFrancisco, 1993). 544 TBI, 156-57. 545 ‘If the identity of the immanent Trinity with the economic is taken to mean that history is the theatre
within which God – as absolute mind, or process or divine event – finds or determines himself as God,
there can be no way of convincingly avoiding the conclusion… that God depends upon creation to be God
and that creation exists by necessity (because of some lack in God), so that God is robbed of his true
transcendence and creation of its true gratuity’ TBI, 157.
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apatheia.’546 Indeed, the freedom of God from ontic determination, Hart proposes, is the
very basis of creation’s goodness. Agreeing with Hart, Alfsvåg states that if ‘the love of
God is eternal and changeless it must be conceived as a reality independent of creation, fall
and redemption, even if this story certainly determines the circumstances under which it is
made manifest.’547 It is because creation is uncompelled and unnecessary that it can be
understood as gift and so reveal the essence of divine love, which is the very nature of who
God is and his only necessary attribute.548 The tendency in modern theology to collapse
God’s transcendence, and to assert the identity between the divine essence and God’s
revelation in Christ on the plane of history, stems, Hart suggests, from a desire to present
an image of a God who suffers not only with us and in our nature but in his own nature,
too. The ‘living God of Scripture’ is, according to some theologians, a more compelling
and attractive deity than the supposedly cold abstraction of a God derived from
metaphysical speculation.
Hart argues that this craving for a passible God is entirely misplaced.549 We long, Hart
suggests, for ‘a companion in pain, a fellow sufferer… we know we have one in Christ and
we refuse to allow any ambiguity – metaphysical, moral or theological – to rob us of his
company.’550 In rigorously defending doctrine of divine apatheia, which he holds to be a
non-negotiable doctrine that is required by the ‘very rationality of the gospel,’551 Hart
aligns himself, not only with the principal current of thought within patristic and medieval
theology, but also with a growing number of contemporary theologians who have sought
to hold together the human suffering of Christ with the immutability of God’s eternal
546 TBI, 157. 547 Alfsvåg, "Impassibility and revelation: On the relation between immanence and economy in Orthodox
and Lutheran thought," 173. 548 TBI, 158. 549 This urge, Hart argues, is ‘… a sort of self-indulgence and apologetic plaintiveness, a sense that, before
God, though we are sinners, we also have a valid perspective, one he must learn to share with us so that he
can sympathise with our lot rather than simply judge us; he must be absolved of his transcendence, so to
speak, before we can consent to submit to his verdict…’ TBI, 159. 550 TBI, 160. 551 DS, 76.
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essence. In other words, Jesus’ passion, through which he experienced genuine suffering,
belongs properly not to the divinity of Christ but to his Incarnation.552
Hart clearly holds a very different position on the question of divine impassibility from
that occupied by Jüngel.553 Hart dismisses Jüngel’s thought as ‘incoherent’ and as evidence
that the German thinker, through the influence of Barth, entirely misunderstands the
doctrine of the analogia entis.554 This orientation smacks, Hart asserts, of a ‘ghastly
Wagnerian opulence,’ a ‘cult of Verwesung [decay],’ and an ‘unwholesome theological
Liebestod’ in Jüngel’s thought.555 Furthermore, Jüngel’s notion that God must overcome
‘nothingness’ through his experience of death is, similarly, rejected by Hart.556 Hart’s most
extensive engagements with a theological opponent are, however, reserved for Robert
Jenson.557 On the matter of Jenson’s trinitarian theology, Hart is particularly critical of his
contemporary. For, in pursuing the logic of the equation between the God in the history of
salvation (the economic Trinity) and God in himself (the immanent Trinity), Hart asserts
that Jenson is defying classical Christian doctrine and is undermining the strict and
inviolable analogical interval that must exist between God in his historical revelation and
God in se. Jenson, Hart believes, is squarely within that school of modern, mainly
Protestant, thought that collapses the analogical interval by asserting that ‘the event of our
salvation in Christ and the event of God’s life in Jesus of Nazareth is in some sense the
story of God becoming the God [h]e is, within which story we are also included…’558
552 DS, 75. 553 Through the adoption of a Lutheran understanding of the communicatio idiomatum, Jüngel has a
tendency to conflate divine identity with the historical experience of Jesus. In so doing, he is open to the
criticism that he collapses God’s transcendence and, as does Moltmann, suggests that history is necessary
for the being of God. This has led to the accusation that there are Monophysite and Docetic elements in
Jüngel’s Christology. 554 TBI, 157, 241. 555 TBI, 373. 556 ‘…nothingness does not challenge God, it is not some ‘thing’ with which God becomes creatively
involved; he passes nothingness by without regard, it is literally nothing to him, it has no part to play in the
way by which he is God or in his desire to create.’ TBI, 259. 557 Given Jenson’s stature in contemporary American theology and the impact that his Systematic Theology
has made within the academy, Hart is generous in highlighting Jenson’s exciting and audacious thought
and in acknowledging his indisputable contribution to Christian thought. David Bentley Hart, "The Lively
God of Robert Jenson," First Things 156 (2005): 28. 558 Hart, "The Lively God of Robert Jenson," 30-31.
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3.2.4 Hart’s eschatology
In his most recent work, That All shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation,
Hart examines the question of an eternal hell and the issue of whether any rational soul
could ever be condemned to everlasting torture. Hart holds that the traditional majority
Christian view of hell as a state of perpetual torment is, both morally and emotionally, an
odious idea and that it represents, quite understandably, the single best argument for
someone to doubt the plausibility of the Christian faith.559 This is precisely the position of
the atheist author Casper Rigsby for whom the Christian notion of hell is ‘outrageously
unjust’ and provokes a response of anger and revulsion.560 Several New Atheist authors
adopt the same position.561 The so-called infernalist position has run through much of
Christian history, across a range of traditions and is still held today by some Christians.
Hart explores the origin of the idea of hell with reference to both traditional Catholic
teaching,562 particularly in its ‘manualist,’ neo-Thomist or neoscholastic forms,563 and to
Calvinist doctrine.564 The ‘notoriously confused reading’ of scripture associated with these
positions, Hart argues, produces a picture of God that is a ‘metaphysical absurdity,’565 for
nobody, in his view, could, logically speaking, merit eternal punishment.
Through a series of for extended meditations, which comprise the central chapters of
That All shall be Saved, Hart examines, in turn, the moral meaning of the doctrine of
creatio ex nihilo, the biblical basis for Christian eschatology, theological anthropology in
connection with the human person as the imago Dei, the meaning of freedom, and the
rationality of the human will. Drawing on both the witness of the New Testament, where
the notion of an eternal hell is remarkably elusive,566 and the teaching of the large majority
559 TAS, 65. 560 Rigsby, The Passion of the Atheist: Exploring the Emotional Aspects of Atheism, 16-18. 561 See, for example Dawkins, The God Delusion, 359-62; Dawkins, Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide,
99-100; Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, 229, 79-83. 562 TAS, 29, 34-37. 563 TAS, 46-48. 564 TAS, 48-52. 565 TAS, 49. 566 TAS, 93.
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of Church Fathers,567 Hart holds that any punishment must be of a limited term and lead
solely to the purification of the soul. Nowhere, he concludes, is there any biblical basis for
envisaging a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan, as though he were a
kind of chthonic god.568 Instead, particularly in the gospels and in the Pauline letters, there
are a large number of passages in the New Testament that appear to promise a final
salvation of all persons and, indeed, of the whole of creation. These passages include
Romans 5.18-19, 1 Corinthians 15.22, Romans 11.32, 1 Timothy 2.3-6, Titus 2.11, John
12.32, 1 John 4.14, 2 Peter 3.9, Matthew 18.14, and John 3.17, amongst other biblical
references. Basing his eschatology on these New Testament sources, as well as the very
obscure and difficult language in the Book of Revelation, Hart argues that hell can only be
understood as having been conquered through Christ’s death on the cross. For, as he
affirms, Christ will conquer individually in every soul so that ‘in the Age to come, and
beyond all ages, all shall come home to the Kingdom prepared for them from before the
foundation of the world.’569
So, although Christians down the centuries, particularly in the West, have mutated the
‘good tidings’ of God’s love ‘into something dreadful, irrational, and morally horrid,’570
this is not Hart’s position. Hart is a thorough-going universalist. 571 Hart adopts a position
that some Christians may be ambivalent about and it could be argued that he sacrifices too
much of the orthodox Christian position to justify his universalism as he chooses to ignore
those passages in the New Testament that make reference to hell. However, Hart remains
resolute in defending his position as a Christian universalist. It is an interesting perspective
and one that could certainly provide a starting point for an extended conversation with
atheist thinkers as the issue may prompt Christians to reflect carefully on their personal
understanding of hell as well as the highly problematic nature of the doctrine for atheists.
567 In this sense, as will be clear in the following chapter, Hart grounds his views on similar sources to
Henri de Lubac, who, as we shall see, advances a strong argument for universal salvation. Hart draws
particularly on Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and Basil of Caesarea. He also refers to the ‘hopeful
universalism’ of Hans Urs von Balthasar, TAS, 102. 568 TAS, 94. 569 TAS, 129. 570 TAS, 131. 571 TAS, 52.
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Personally, I am supportive of Hart’s position although I recognise that there are other
Christians who maintain a belief in a populated hell. There is also certainly much support
for Hart’s universalism from within the Orthodox Christian tradition572 as well as amongst
many of the Church Fathers. As de Lubac does, Hart rejects the late Augustinian and
neoscholastic tradition that separates nature and grace and holds to the doctrines of
predestination and inherited guilt,573 and dismisses, on theological, philosophical and
moral grounds, the arguments for hell’s eternity as ‘manifestly absurd.’574 The Christian
belief in God as infinitely good, perfectly just, and inexhaustibly loving, makes the
possibility that finite rational beings could be subject to eternal misery an impossibility,
for such a prospect would be utterly contradictory to the nature of God. As in his other
texts, Hart’s eschatological reflections in That All shall be Saved are expressed in robust
terms, and he has little, if any, sympathy with those who hold opposing positions to his
own. His argument, however, is a coherent one that is biblically based and faithful to the
patristic tradition. Hart’s vision, which echoes the position of de Lubac, as I shall underline
in the next chapter, is an important one, for it represents a key element of the tradition that
the Church will need to draw upon as it seeks to enter into dialogue with atheists and
unbelievers for whom the notion of hell is such an abhorrent concept.
3.3 Postmodern philosophy and theology
The apologetic dimension of Hart’s project contains a number of facets. As we shall see
later in this chapter, he offers a penetrating critique of post-Christian culture and, in
particular, the arguments assembled by thinkers within the New Atheist movement. In The
Beauty of the Infinite, however, Hart’s principal concerns are with the atheistic strand, as
he interprets it, within some thinkers in the Continental philosophical tradition. He laments
the corrosive effect of Continental thought on Christian theology, for he believes its
572 See, for example, Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press,
1986), 73-76. 573 TAS, 199. 574 TAS, 202.
153
economy of violence is profoundly hostile to the message the gospel of peace pronounced
by the Church. Within this pluriform set of voices, especially in the writing of Nietzsche,
Heidegger and their successors, Hart identifies what he calls a ‘tragic fatedness of
violence.’575 For example, Hart asserts that Derrida’s apparently post-metaphysical
affirmation of difference is merely an inversion of the violence within the Western
metaphysical tradition’s denial of difference.576 Hart is also critical of Levinas,’577
characterising his work a ‘prodigy of incoherence,’ as ‘Manichean, Orphic, or gnostic.’578
Hart also judges Levinas’ ethical reflections as both ‘nonsense’ and ‘morally hideous’ and
his rhetoric is dismissed as ‘mournful bombast.’579
For Hart, the rhetoric of postmodern thought, with its terrible sublimity and its emphasis
on the place of violence and strife as foundational for reality, spurs him to offer an
alternative vision, which, as I have noted, centres on the notion of God as infinite beauty,
ultimate goodness and the fount of being. And this reaches its fulfilment in the conquest
of evil, sin and death that is manifest in the resurrection, the event that, in its cardinal sign
of the empty tomb, emancipates the world from the world and its travails:580 ‘the tomb,
after all, is the symbol par excellence of metaphysical totality and the mythos of cosmic
violence.’581 The resurrection subverts the categories of truth governing the world and
ushers in the word of Christ, which cannot be silenced.582
575 TBI, 43. 576 TBI, 54-55. 577 Hart endorses Gillian Rose’s assessment of Levinas’s vision, when she describes it as ‘Buddhist
Judaism.' Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37. 578 TBI, 75. 579 TBI, 82. 580 TBI, 335. 581 TBI, 334. 582 TBI, 335. Anthony Kelly, “Easter and the Empty Tomb,” 3-4.
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3.3.1 Engagements with Nietzsche
As with the other major interlocutors examined in this thesis, Hart dedicates a significant
part of his work to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. In the current section I will explore
Hart’s reading of Nietzsche by highlighting both the important insights and some of the
problematic issues raised by Nietzsche. Hart has a degree of praise for Nietzsche’s
denunciation of Christianity, which, it should be noted, focuses primarily on Nietzsche’s
distaste for Christian life and morality, rather than on a rejection of Christian faith or of
the teachings of Christ.583 Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, Hart argues, is primarily on
aesthetic, rather than rational, grounds.
Nietzsche, Hart points out, adopts the Hegelian emphasis on flux, derived from
Heraclitus and others in the Ephesian pre-Socratic school of philosophy. Nietzsche gives
this expression in his fable of the death of God. However, in this nihilistic move,
philosophy’s capacity to speak authentically about being and truth is regarded by Hart as
having failed. In contrast, the Christian vision is that being is to be interpreted as something
gratuitous and that truth is rooted, not in rational analysis, but in the concretely historical
form of Jesus Christ. And so, Hart believes that the history of nihilism is the forgetfulness
of the gratuitous gift of God in creation and the refusal to recognise the ontological analogy
by which the being of human existence is related to the infinite source of all being that is
God.584 For Nietzsche, in the world after the death of God, no reconciliation is possible
between pagan (or Dionysian) exuberance and gnostic (or Christian) withdrawal,
especially in the domain of ethics.585 Hart rejects this opposition. However, he argues that
it is this Nietzschean substrate that provides the platform upon which the godless edifice
of postmodern discourse comes to be built, particular as it finds its expression in the work
of Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida and others.586
583 TBI, 94. 584 TBI, 227. 585 TBI, 93. 586 TBI, 35.
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Hart acknowledges that Nietzsche presents a formidable and audacious challenge to
Christianity, which continues to resonate within both contemporary atheism as well as
within the apologetic task of the Church as it seeks to understand and respond to unbelief
in the modern world. Thus, for Hart, Nietzsche represents a form of liberation, one which
demolishes the citadels of metaphysics and reason, and a philosophical adversary whose
critique is genuinely as radical as the kerygma that it denounces. Nietzsche enables
‘theology to glimpse something of its own depth in the mirror of his contempt… the
Nietzschean attack on the gospel is first and foremost a virtuoso performance, a rhetorical
tour de force, moving from imaginative historical constructions to displays of brilliant
psychological portraiture…’587 The performative, rather than rational, quality of
Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity is, perhaps, the essential hallmark of his work. For, as
was noted in Chapter One, Nietzsche’s primary concern is not to construct a rational
demolition of Christian propositions but, rather, to attack the aesthetic character of
Christian life. As Hart astutely discerns, the key issue for Nietzsche is that it is his
sensibility, more than his reason, that suffers offense.588 In other words, Hart holds, for
Nietzsche, the Christian insistence, that the ‘other’ world is the source of all that is real,
amounts to a ‘squalid deformation of the world that is, an idealization that derogates the
actual, a soothing promise of immortality that thwart’s life’s proper instincts.’589 Hart
believes that Nietzsche’s surest blow against Christianity is constituted by this attack on
its morality, identifying the ‘brilliant’ rhetoric of Nietzsche in his On the Genealogy of
Morals, which describes the ‘logic and fearful inventiveness’ of the resentful heart.590 The
savage attack on the decadent faith of his contemporaries in this work exposes, as Hart
acknowledges, the ‘hypocrisy, egoism and impurity of motive’ that had come to be
associated with an impotent faith, which centred on the ‘preservation of the weak in their
weakness.’
587 TBI, 94. 588 TBI, 95. 589 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 118. 590 TBI, 98.
156
Despite this acknowledgement, Hart is clear that the Nietzschean vein of thought in
postmodern philosophy runs in opposition to the Christian evangel and that it needs to be
rigorously resisted and undermined. This conflict is presented as two stories, which Hart
characterises as ‘Dionysus against the Crucified.’591 He draws on an important theme in
Milbank’s work where an ‘ontology of violence’ in the nihilistic philosophical systems that
have taken Nietzsche as their foundation is identified.592 This current, Milbank argues, can
be seen in Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida and others. Hart concurs and
proceeds to dissect the Continental philosophical foundations of modern secular thought,
which he argues stem from the primordial, chthonic, and indiscriminating violences [sic.]
of Dionysus, Nietzsche’s pagan anti-hero, who sets the tenor of postmodern nihilism.593
Hart reads this violent and Heracleitean flux in Hegel, for whom time and history become
absorbed into the epic of the Idea and for whom strife and conflict are ineluctably
connected within the processes of negation, dialectical determination and the endless
labour of thought. Despite Hegel’s claims, this perspective is, Hart points out, deeply
metaphysical because the strife of difference is accorded a transcendental privilege of its
own, which is ‘essential to truth’s inward determination.’594 It is, then, just another
discourse of totality (a narrative for which Hegel has been critiqued by many
commentators), which represents the triumph in recent thought of Heraclitus, with the
associated notion of dynamic flow, over Parmenides, symbolising immobile totality.595
Hart’s response to Nietzsche is to seek to identify the contradiction in Nietzsche’s
rhetoric. Referring to Nietzsche’s denunciation of Christianity, Hart notes that ‘… for all
the cunning and psychological inventiveness of his genealogy, it fails at every juncture to
accommodate the complexity of what he wishes to describe.’596 For, despite Nietzsche’s
rejection of objective truth as a ‘metaphorical pleating within the fabric of language,’597
591 This is the title of Part One of The Beauty of the Infinite. 592 TBI, 35. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1990), 278-79. 593 TBI, 36. 594 TBI, 38. 595 TBI, 37. 596 TBI, 107. 597 TBI, 103.
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and given what he believes to be the cultural contingency of all truth claims, Hart detects
in Nietzsche’s polemic an absolutist metaphysics, which takes the form of an unreflective
naturalism, constellating around the concepts of ‘life,’ ‘instinct,’ and ‘nature’ that pepper
the Nietzschean corpus. Additionally, the Nietzschean notion of difference as opposition,
contradiction, resistance and the impulse of one human will to vanquish another’s appears
to offer a closure of meaning that represents a foundational ontology of violence. These
observations lead Hart to suspect the supposedly anti-metaphysical tenor of Nietzsche’s
critique. For, even in the context of Nietzsche’s aesthetically driven post-Christian
counternarrative, indeed in his postmodern kerygma, there remains a stake on truth.
Furthermore, Hart resolutely rejects the Nietzschean idea that the crucifixion is a negation
of the material realm. On the contrary, as Hart unfolds in an extensive excursus on the
biblical metaphor of wine, which traces the symbolic role of this substance from its role in
the Old Testament to its place in uniting the Church with Christ’s presence in the Eucharist,
God’s blessing on creation is enacted through the very medium of the physicality of earthly
materiality. And we see in the cross, the fulfilment of God’s beauty, blessing and goodness,
and in Christ’s sacrifice an affirmation of the whole of creation.598 The crucifixion is,
indeed, Hart notes, not a repudiation, but an affirmation of fleshly life, a form of suffering
that hallows life itself.599
3.3.2 The rhetoric of violence
Hart is quick to highlight and condemn a strand of violence he believes to be an ineluctable
outcome of the postmodern philosophy that has developed in the shadow of Nietzsche’s
thought. He does not propose that Nietzsche was personally violent and does note that
Nietzsche denounced the anti-Semitism that was so fashionable in his day. However,
Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power does, Hart believes, lead inevitably to the atrocious
acts of savage cruelty visited on the Jewish people (and others) by the Nazis in their acts
598 TBI, 104-09. 599 TBI, 109.
158
of ‘Aryan exuberance.’600 Nietzsche advanced a joyous affirmation of a ‘world of signs
without fault, without truth, and without origin,’ which was to be the basis of Derrida’s
notions of the eternal play of difference and the ‘adventure of the trace.’ It echoes the
Kantian myth of the subject’s moral freedom and finds further development in the work of
Jacques Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault, all of whom assert the freedom of
the individual self to declare its right to power.601
For Hart, such notions of ‘pure affirmation,’ which are fundamentally atheological,
cannot but fail to generate ‘robust and pitiless nihilisms.’602 Seen in the light of the gospel,
Hart believes that these ‘infinite perspectives of affirmation’ reverse the Christian
understanding of the infinite, which, in contrast to thought grounded in the postmodern
sublime and in the affirmation of the autonomy of the human will, offers a vision of the
truer sublime that proceeds from a theological account of beauty, which stems from the
inexhaustible glory of being.603 In these, and many other denunciations, Nietzsche
develops a corrosive undermining of the Christian message. However, as Hart notes, this
is not without putting in its place an alternative theological framework, which fits
Nietzsche’s own form of piety. This, as we have seen, revolves around a counter-deity, the
figure of Dionysus, his own ‘god of indestructible life, ecstasy, joy, and power.’604 In
contradistinction to the cross, which is a symbol of contradiction and its solution,
Nietzsche’s Dionysian affirmation reaches beyond both contradiction and reconciliation.
Here, Hart, recalls Deleuze’s notion that the suffering of Christ is an indictment of life,
rendering life unjust, guilty and deserving of the suffering that accompanies it. Life, thus
seen, is a ‘dark workshop’ where ‘life can only be loved when it is tender, weak, in torment,
mutilated…’605 Hart cannot agree with these notions and characterises them as coarse and
childish vituperative venom.606 Furthermore, although he understands Nietzsche’s claim
600 TBI, 70. 601 TBI, 70-71. 602 TBI, 71. 603 TBI, 72. 604 TBI, 96. 605 TBI, 97. 606 TBI, 97.
159
that Christian morals are nothing but those values that are inevitable for slaves, the weak,
and the ill constituted, somehow grotesquely elevated to the status of universal law, Hart
argues that these same Christian values did indeed triumph over the noble values of
antiquity and that the Christian image of the Evil One is nothing but a distillation of the
instincts of corrupted human nature. ‘Judeo-Christian morality is the ingenious creation of
an indefatigably aggressive impotence, which transforms itself into an irresistible
power…’607
3.4 Encounters with atheism
In common with Jüngel, Hart highlights the contribution of Descartes, whose thought
paved the transition from the premodern to a modern philosophical method, as a key factor
in the loss of the sense of the sacred and the erosion of a collective understanding of the
transcendence of God. Descartes, Hart argues, thought of all organisms, including human
persons, as mechanisms and considered the soul to be an immaterial ‘occupant’ of the
body. Thus, according to the Cartesian model, the soul merely indwells and surveys a
mechanical reality with which it has no natural continuity and to which it is related only
extrinsically. For this reason, for Descartes, the human ‘natural’ knowledge of God is
merely a kind of logical, largely featureless, deduction of God’s ‘existence.’ This is derived
from the presence in the individual mind (the cogito) of certain abstract ideas, such as the
conception of the infinite, which the world is impotent to have implanted there. Thus
Descartes inaugurates a mechanical view of nature within which the soul and God are both
set quite apart from the cosmic machine: one haunting it from within, the other
commanding it from without.608 Hart sees the dissolution of a geocentric cosmos as a
‘spiritual bereavement for Western humanity,’ which has created, within the modern
period, an argument between theism and atheism that is largely no more than a tension
607 TBI, 98. 608 EG, 60-61.
160
between two different effectively atheist visions of existence.609 Ontology has been
displaced by cosmology, and cosmology has been reduced to a matter of mechanics.610
In addition to his engagements with the critique of Christianity articulated by Nietzsche
and those Continental philosophers whose work builds on Nietzsche’s thought, Hart has
also sought to respond to more recent and popular manifestations of atheism. This
dimension of Hart’s project finds expression in writing published after The Beauty of the
Infinite, in his books Atheist Delusions, The Experience of God and The Hidden and the
Manifest, as well as in a number of journal articles. Within these works, Hart seeks to
challenge the rhetoric of the New Atheist movement, highlight the vacuity of post-
Christian culture and present an apologetic case for Christianity that is based on a rebuttal
of the many misconceptions and false assumptions of contemporary popular atheism.
It should be noted that Hart does not dismiss all expressions of atheism.611 Indeed, he
articulates something close to admiration for those forms of atheism that are characterised
by a sober, philosophically-rooted and wistful tone, seeing these expressions of unbelief
that provide a searching and serious-minded challenge to Christianity.612 In contrast with
the gravitas associated with such ‘noble, precious and necessary’ modes of unbelief, Hart
has no patience with the New Atheist authors, whom he has engaged with at some length.
He regards these writers as philosophically inept and marked by the very fundamentalist
orientation and prejudiced outlook that they are so quick to condemn within religious
belief. Unlike what he regards as ‘truly profound atheists,’ the New Atheists have not
begun to understand the consequences of their path of rejection, instead choosing to peddle
609 EG, 61. 610 EG, 63-64. 611 Amongst the ‘civilised critics’ who Hart holds to have mounted imaginative challenges to the Christian
faith, marked by elegance and moral acuity, he includes Celsus, Porphyry, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, and
Nietzsche. 612 David Bentley Hart, "Believe it or Not: David B. Hart Sees the New Atheism Movement Going the Way
of the Pet Rock," First Things 203 (2010): 36.
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beliefs that amount to no more than an ‘insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant
diatribe.’613
Furthermore, in the various forms of modern, culturally incubated, unbelief he is
referring to, Hart detects a fundamental misunderstanding in the object of atheistic
arguments and cultural unbelief, namely the meaning of the word ‘God.’ Thus, he points
out there is an illusion in public debates about religion that the word ‘God’ is used in the
same way by theists and atheists alike.614 However, there are incommensurable
understandings of God in operation. For those of faith, to speak of God properly is to refer
to the one infinite source of all that there is, the self-caused creator who is eternal,
omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and who is both perfectly transcendent of all things
and absolutely immanent in all things.615 Atheist conceptions of God, particularly in
popular expressions of unbelief within society today, tend to suggest that God is a ‘supreme
mechanical cause located somewhere within the continuum of nature.’616 Hart’s criticism
is understandable given the repeated reference to God as ‘a being’ in the books written by
New Atheist authors. God, so conceived, is really just an immense and very powerful
entity amongst other entities, a God that resembles the form of divinity believed in by
seventeenth and eighteenth-century Deists.617
3.4.1 Hart’s critique of contemporary Western culture
Hart is acutely conscious that Christianity is no longer a dominant force in Western society,
that the role of the institutional Church, which he confesses he has little affection for, has
weakened considerably and that a growing proportion of the population has ceased to
believe in the message of the gospel. And, like other authors whose thought has been
613 Hart, "Believe it or Not: David B. Hart Sees the New Atheism Movement Going the Way of the Pet
Rock," 36. 614 EG, 14. 615 EG, 30. 616 EG, 28. 617 Hart, "Believe it or Not: David B. Hart Sees the New Atheism Movement Going the Way of the Pet
Rock," 37.
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explored in this thesis, Hart notes the connection between the faith of the Church and the
contemporary climate of unbelief in our world. ‘Christianity over the centuries not only
has proved so irrepressibly fissile… but has also given rise to a culture capable of the most
militant atheism, and even of self-conscious nihilism.’618 Additionally, Hart recognises that
modern atheism has emerged in Western culture as an outcome of the death of God
proclaimed by Nietzsche, which has destroyed the ancient conception of an enchanted
world and undermined the orientation, for many at least, that places God at the centre of
life.619
Hart is a resolute opponent of the ‘ideology of the modern.’ By this, he means the
‘modern age’s grand narrative of itself: its story of the triumph of critical reason over
“irrational” faith, of the progress of social morality toward greater justice and freedom, of
the “tolerance” of the secular state, and of the unquestioned ethical primacy of
individualism or collectivism…’620 Rather than assenting to the oft-repeated claim that
reason is modernity’s crowning glory, Hart suggests that the so-called ‘Age of Reason’
was, in fact, the beginning of the eclipse of reason’s authority as a cultural value. The
modern age, he argues, is marked not by sound reason but by triumphant, unthinking and
inflexible dogmatism in all spheres of human activity (including the sciences) and that it
harbours a huge array of soothing fundamentalisms, some of which are religious and some
purely secular.621 The hallmark of modernity, for Hart, is the quest for personal autonomy
and freedom.
In the end, the outcome of this thrust for self-determination in a world shorn of
transcendent meaning is a cultural system within which we believe in nothing. This is not
to say that individuals in society have no beliefs. It is, however, Hart claims, a condition
whereby, in the modern world, we ‘place our trust in an original absence underlying all of
reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to
618 Hart, The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2017), 246. 619 AD, 229. 620 AD, xi. 621 AD, xi-xii.
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our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we
choose.’622 Thus, in an age conditioned by an overwhelming consensus surrounding the
supremacy of absolute liberty and personal volition, there is a sense of the unreality of any
‘value’ greater than an individual’s choice, and of the absence of any transcendent Good,
which orders our desires towards a higher end.623 This, again, stems, Hart believes, from
Christianity’s demise.
When, therefore, Christianity departs, what is left behind? It may be that Christianity is the
midwife of nihilism precisely because, in rejecting it, people necessarily reject everything
except the bare horizon of the undetermined will. No other god can now be found. The
story of the crucified God took everything to itself, and so – in departing – takes
everything with it: habits of reverence and restraint, awe, the command of the Good within
us. Only the will persists, set before the abyss of limitless possibility, seeking its way – or
forging its way – in the dark.624
Thus, the rejection of Christianity is simultaneously a rejection of ‘everything except the
barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity.’625 Hart believes that, as modernity has
worked itself out, the creativity of Christian ideals has become subdued and, in some cases,
exhausted. It is for this reason that Hart regards modern Western atheism as a Christian
heresy, something that simply could not have arisen in a non-Christian setting.626 The
power that Christianity once exerted over Western culture has receded and the erosion of
the notion of ‘humanity’ propounded by Christianity has set a post-Christian culture on a
path toward the posthuman.627 This was the inevitable outcome of Nietzsche’s prophecy
concerning the narcotic banality of the Last Men.628
622 AD, 21. 623 David Bentley Hart, "Christ and Nothing," First Things 136 (2003): 47. 624 AD, 230. 625 Hart, "Christ and Nothing," 53. 626 David Bentley Hart, "The Timidity of the New Atheists," in The Unknown God: Sermons Responding to
the New Atheists, ed. John Hughes (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 91. 627 AD, 215. 628 Hart, "Christ and Nothing," 54.
164
In addition to his engagements with the currents of unbelief running through Continental
philosophy and his dissection of post-Christian culture, Hart’s apologetic concerns, as I
have already noted, have also led him to critique the arguments and influence of writers
within the New Atheist movement. His confrontation with this particular anti-Christian
polemic has taken shape in several articles and essays. His work Atheist Delusions is also,
ostensibly, written as a response to the arguments of New Atheism although most of the
book’s chapters do not, in fact, directly address the authors who identify with this form of
atheism. Although his denunciation of New Atheist writers is forthright and direct, Hart
also acknowledges that this phenomenon is parasitic upon and, indeed, triggered by
contemporary expressions of Christianity itself, particularly in its twin manifestations as
either an insipid, washed out and indistinct dimension of Western culture, or as a form of
fundamentalist dogmatism. ‘The New Atheism is merely an example of what happens
when a new religious inspiration degenerates into an arid and infantile dogmatism, purged
of historical memory and rational depth – when, that is, it ceases to inspire serious thought
and begins to generate only therapies and catechisms.’629
Hart characterises the generation of confident, even strident, atheist proselytisers who
are associated with the New Atheist movement as those who seem to know nothing of the
religious beliefs that they reject and who have no real sense of what the experience of faith
is like.630 Modern Western atheism, Hart argues, is quite novel and must be differentiated
from personal unbelief or the eccentric doctrines of philosophical sects, which had been
the case in the past. Contemporary atheism, he suggests is ‘a conscious, ideological, social,
and philosophical project, with a broad popular constituency – a cause, a dogma, a
metaphysics, a system of values.’631 Hart asserts that the representatives of the New
Atheism movement have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of God as God is
conceived in Christianity and in other theistic traditions. A case in point, Hart believes, is
Dawkins’ discussion of Aquinas’ ‘Five Ways’ in The God Delusion632 where Dawkins
629 Hart, "The Timidity of the New Atheists," 91. 630 EG, 20. 631 EG, 19-20. 632 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 100-03.
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mistakes Thomas’ statements as reasons for why we should believe in God, which they
certainly are not.633 Fergus Kerr makes precisely the same point when he asserts that ‘the
famous “five ways” of demonstrating God’s existence… are not an attempt to refute
atheism but an effort of faith seeking understanding of itself.’634 It is an example, Hart
asserts, of the theological illiteracy of the New Atheists, an issue that extends to their
understanding of the nature of God. For the God who the New Atheists reject is, in fact, a
god, not a transcendent reality at all but a higher or more powerful of more splendid
dimension of immanent reality. The God so envisaged is essentially a very large object or
agency within the universe, or perhaps besides the universe, a being among beings, who
differs from all other beings in magnitude, power and duration, but not ontologically, and
who is related to the world as a craftsman is related to an artefact.635 In other words, the
God that is rejected by Dawkins and others is, in fact, the God of Deism, a super-being or
moral agent who is comparable to Zeus, Wotan or Odin.
Hart also addresses the implicit scientism within New Atheist thought. The New
Atheists often assert that science and faith are incompatible, particularly in relation to the
Darwinian theory of evolution. Hart, however, disagrees, pointing out that many
Christians, John Henry Newman amongst them, find nothing in the science of evolution
that is contrary to or problematic for the doctrine of creation. Creation is, according to
patristic thought, an eternal act and not a series of temporal cosmic interventions; it is a
divine act that pervades all time.636
Hart certainly matches the somewhat irascible tone of the New Atheist writers with his
own rather bellicose rhetoric. Daniel Dennett’s work, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a
Natural Phenomenon, is, for example, characterised as an attempt to ‘wean a credulous
humanity from its reliance on the preposterous fantasies of religion’ in a manner that has
633 EG, 21-22. 634 Fergus Kerr, Thomas Aquinas: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 635 EG, 31-32. Hart also states that ‘the god with whom most modern popular atheism usually concerns
itself is one we might call a “demiurge” (dēmiourgos): a Greek term that originally meant a kind or public
technician or artisan but that came to mean a particular kind of “world-maker” or cosmic craftsman.’ EG,
35. 636 EG, 26.
166
provoked ‘exultant bellowing from the godless.’637 The ‘tireless tractarian,’ Richard
Dawkins, is credited as having an ‘embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning,’
which is articulated with ‘rhetorical recklessness’ in order to entrance his readers.
Christopher Hitchens, the author of God is Not Great, is guilty, according to Hart, of gross
intellectual caricature, whist Sam Harris’s The End of Faith is, Hart asserts, no more than
an ‘extravagantly callow attack on religious belief.’638 Harris is also accused by Hart of
displaying an ‘abysmal ignorance of almost every [religious] topic he addresses’ and of
publishing a book that is no more than ‘a concatenation of shrill, petulant assertions.’639 In
contrast to earlier, philosophically-grounded forms of atheism (stretching from Celsus
through to Nietzsche), which, as I have noted, Hart admits to having an appreciation for,
the New Atheist movement is brushed aside because of its display of ignorance,
philosophical ineptitude, vacuous arguments, self-righteous and triumphantly hectoring
tone and scarcely disguised fundamentalist logic.640
Daniel Dennett is a particular target for Hart’s invective. Dennett’s claim, in his work
Breaking the Spell, that religion is an entirely natural phenomenon (an assertion that he
holds can be demonstrated by empirical science), and as a result can be rejected as an
entirely arbitrary manifestation of human nature’s blind machinery, is dismissed by Hart
as an inconsequential and embarrassing observation that poses no challenge to faith. For
Hart, religion is of course a natural phenomenon, which is ubiquitous in human culture and
is an irreducible component within the evolution of societies and which has itself, over
time, quite clearly changed and developed. This point, however, has no bearing, Hart
believes, on the question of whether religion can be a vehicle of divine truth and a context
within which religious adherents can orientate themselves toward ultimate reality.641
Furthermore, Dennett’s critique is entirely misplaced because, as Hart points out, there is
no such thing as ‘religion’ in the abstract. The many systems of belief that are labelled as
‘religions’ are, of course, marked by their own distinctive beliefs, practices and modes of
637 AD, 3. 638 AD, 3-4. 639 AD, 8. 640 AD, 4. 641 AD, 7.
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belonging, which give specific expression to a rather more universal impulse (that Hart
allows for), which might be called the ‘natural desire for God.’642
In addition to his engagement with the so-called ‘Four Horsemen’ of New Atheism
(Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens), Hart offers a withering critique of the wider
community of popular atheist writers, which includes figures such as A.C. Grayling, Victor
Stenger, Graham Oppy, Michael Tooley, Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law. Responding
to a collection of atheistic ‘manifestos’ by these and other authors, published as 50 Voices
of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists,643 Hart is no less scathing than he is in his other critiques
of New Atheism, concluding the that ‘the book as a whole adds up to absolutely nothing,’
that it is ‘depressing,’ and that the work reflects the ‘general vapidity of all public religious
discourse’ within Western culture.644 The obstreperous character of New Atheist
arguments is contrasted with the moral courage, noble scepticism and prophetic qualities
of previous generations of intellectual atheists who, Hart recognises, understood that their
attitude of critical suspicion was altogether different from the ‘glib abandonment of one
vision of absolute truth for another – say, fundamentalist Christianity for fundamentalist
materialism or something vaguely and inaccurately called humanism.’645
Summarising the contribution of New Atheism to contemporary culture by contrasting
it to the apocalyptic interruption of Christianity, with its power to transform lives and
society alike, Hart suggests that its appeal is rather like a form of narcotic. It soothes and
beguiles but, ultimately, offers a critique that is far less confusing and troubling that what
it seeks to displace. It cannot engage with Christianity’s notion that time has been invaded
by eternity or of its penetration of universal meaning through the particularity of the God-
man, Jesus of Nazareth, and it is quite unable to grasp the incomprehensibility of the
642 AD, 7-8. 643 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, ed. Russell Blackford and Udo Schüklenk (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009). 644 Hart, "Believe it or Not: David B. Hart Sees the New Atheism Movement Going the Way of the Pet
Rock," 36. 645 Hart, "Believe it or Not: David B. Hart Sees the New Atheism Movement Going the Way of the Pet
Rock," 36.
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Christian message, a vision centred on ‘an event whose proclamation we have always yet
to understand.’646
3.5 An assessment of Hart’s work
Having provided an overview of the principal themes in his thought, in the following
section I will offer some evaluative comments on the important contributions that Hart
makes to systemic Christian theology, particular as it engages with atheism and unbelief.
Throughout a sizeable corpus of literature, Hart demonstrates a depth of engagement with
a wide range of theological literature, which ranges from that produced by both Latin and
Greek patristic authors, through medieval writers to a significant number of recent and
contemporary theologians. Hart provides several perspectives that offer considerable
promise and potential for the Church as it seeks to listen to, enter into conversation with,
and respond to, the critiques presented by the prevailing culture of unbelief and secular
immanence, which we encounter in much of Western culture.
Firstly, Hart expounds a robust doctrine of God, which restates and develops key themes
in the classical Christian theological tradition in a manner that has the potential to be highly
fruitful in the context of a society that has, to a large degree, grown either weary with, or
become deaf to, discourse about divinity. Because his audience is primarily a theologically
literate and academic one, Hart’s project is unlikely to garner a large readership amongst
those who have rejected Christianity. However, for those who do engage with his writing
about God, God’s relationship with the created order and the place of grace in shaping
human lives, there are, I believe, ideas in his work that offer a rich field for reflection and
which may resonate with the human quest for meaning, even when this follows paths that
bypass institutional religious settings. Barber articulates this when he asserts that Hart is
amongst those theologians who ‘make a thoroughgoing case for transcendence as that
646 Hart, "Believe it or Not: David B. Hart Sees the New Atheism Movement Going the Way of the Pet
Rock," 46.
169
which is necessary for any attempt to imagine new possibilities of existence.’647 In
stressing the alterity of God, Hart provides an important corrective to the tendency within
some atheist arguments and certain expressions of Christian thought alike to speak of God
in excessively precise terms and, in so doing, betray the kind of onto-theological
conceptions of divinity that are so vehemently denied by Heidegger and others. As one
reviewer of The Experience of God notes, ‘Hart’s clarity about the meaning of “God” could
help diminish the frequency of promiscuous Christian God-talk and remind talkative
Protestants of the helpfulness of Hart’s own Orthodox appeals to the “apophatic” tradition:
the wise necessity of silence before the God who cannot be adequately described in merely
human categories.’648
As I have emphasised, Hart is particularly exercised by the notions of desire, beauty,
goodness and infinity as domains within which the human experience of God can be best
understood. And in this way, he is able to introduce to the conversation that the Church
needs to have with atheism, along with less forthright expressions of unbelief, themes that
may serve as the basis for dialogue and mutual exploration. These are universal elements
of the human experience, around which meaningful encounter between theism and atheism
may take place. The weight that Hart places on the doctrine of creation, rather than that of
soteriology, within his theology, and the concomitant attention that he gives to the world
as a mirror of divinity, may hold open the possibility of dialogue between Christian
theology and those perspectives which are atheistic and which stress a this-worldly
orientation in the human pursuit of meaning. Thus, Hart’s proposition that the beauty of
the created world provides a lens through which God’s own beauty and goodness can be
perceived might be of value in resisting narrow conceptions of secularity based on the
notion that the secular and the religious spheres are in opposition to one another, and so
help in rescuing the ancient Christian understanding of the saeculum as the worldly and
647 Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-secularism and the Future of Immanence, 79. 648 Bob Robinson, "The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss: The One Theology Book All
Atheists Really Should Read?," Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice 21,
no. 3 (2014): 37.
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temporal domain within which God’s presence is revealed to humanity.649 In this way, by
focusing on the sanctity of creation and the Thomistic idea of grace perfecting rather than
abrogating nature, Hart’s theology has the potential to provoke constructive dialogue
between theists and atheists in connection with the immanent domain of material
existence.650
In the remainder of this section, I will examine Hart’s perspectives on the question of
natural evil and go on to highlight some concerns relating to his discussion of this matter.
Hart rightly recognises that, for many people, the issue of human suffering, particularly as
a result of natural disasters, presents an unbridgeable barrier to faith in God. The trauma
induced by calamitous events, whether experienced directly or through the witnessing of
others’ misfortunes, can generate a form of protest atheism, which renders those who adopt
such a stance highly resistant to any position of faith. Drawing on the objections advanced
by Dostoevsky’s fictional character, Ivan Karamazov, Hart asserts that this orientation is
not so much a matter of belief as of consent, meaning that faith in God is resisted not as an
end-point of rational analysis but because of an objection to the coexistence of a
purportedly good God and the reality of creaturely pain and anguish. Insightfully, however,
Hart holds that such a position is not necessarily antithetical to belief but that it is, in fact,
far closer to a Christian view than might, at first sight, have been thought.651
Hart’s work The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? extends and
develops his position on God’s relationship with suffering first set out in his article, “No
Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility,” in Pro Ecclesia.652 Hart presents his
considered response to, and endorsement of, Ivan’s rebellion. The book was written in the
aftermath of the tsunami around the shores of the Indian Ocean, which occurred on Boxing
649 Clayton Crockett, Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought (London: Routledge,
2001), 1. 650 Gabriel Vahanian, "Theology and the secular," in Secular Theology: American Radical Theological
Thought, ed. Clayton Crockett (London: Routledge, 2001), 13, 15, 17.
651 ‘…the pathos of his protest is, to my mind, exquisitely Christian – though he [Ivan] himself seems not
to be aware of this: a rage against explanation, a refusal to grant that the cruelty or brute natural misfortune
or evil of any variety can be justified by some ‘happy ending’ that makes sense of all our misery and
mischance.’ "Where was God?: An Interview with David Bentley Hart," 26. 652 Hart, "No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility."
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Day, 2004, and which claimed the lives of over a quarter of a million people in 14 countries.
It reflects on the questions that were posed following the disaster: ‘why did God let this
happen?’ or ‘where was God in the tsunami?’ Hart does not seek to provide any satisfactory
answers to such questions, and is quick to condemn those Christians, particularly within
the Calvinist tradition, who attempt to make sense of such atrocious suffering in various
ways, attributing it to an expression of the divine sovereignty, a manifestation of God’s
plan, a punishment for human sin, or who locate the event within a framework of ethical
deism. The indignation and rage voiced by atheists in the face of natural disasters is, Hart
argues, much closer to the vision of the gospel than the well-meaning but misplaced
attempts of some Christians to rationalise the suffering that these events generate. Here,
Hart aligns himself with elements of Voltaire’s arguments in his Poème sur le désastre de
Lisbonne, written as a response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1st November 1755, within
which the author lambasts the bland optimism of popular theodicy that stemmed from the
prevailing deist conceptions of God. The profound consternation of those who reject the
possibility of God’s goodness in the midst of human suffering does, in fact, Hart argues,
find its echo in the Christian doctrine of evil’s emptiness, lack of ultimate value or spiritual
meaning.
Drawing on classical theological notions of evil as the privation of good, Hart highlights
God’s opposition to suffering, wickedness and death. These aspects of human experience,
which cast their shadow over our existence, do not point to a deficiency in God’s goodness.
Whilst their conquest has yet to be fully realised, they have, at least in some sense, been
defeated by Christ’s death and resurrection. The devastating impact of natural disasters,
where creation ‘groans in expectation,’ can only be understood as a manifestation of that
to which God is opposed but from which God rescues humanity by Christ’s participation
in human suffering in order to raise up his creatures, wipe all tears from their eyes and
incorporate them in the divine life where there is no sorrow or suffering. The Doors of the
Sea includes an extended set of reflections on the divine victory that God has won over
evil and suffering within which Hart outlines how God, ‘who is love,’ wages war with the
demonic forces, those ‘Principalities and Powers’ that threaten creation. The suffering of
the present age, which falls under the spell of this cosmic struggle, will, Hart asserts, by
drawing on Paul, be swept away in the ‘glory that will be revealed to us (Romans 8.18).’
Thus, the moral pathos voiced by Ivan Karamazov and his successors within the
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contemporary world must be placed within the context of the Christian vision of God’s
victory over evil, which centres on the event of the cross.
For Hart, God’s triumph over evil’s chill emptiness and negation of the good – as the
privatio boni – can only be understood in the context of the equally essential doctrine of
divine impassibility, which, as has already been noted, is a central strand in his theology.
Also, developing ideas expounded in The Beauty of the Infinite, Hart’s writing on the
Indian Ocean tsunami gives him scope to highlight the simultaneous realities of Christ’s
human experience of pain and death, on the one hand, and, on the other, the immutability
of God’s infinite essence, which possesses the fullness of charity and for whom the world,
including its suffering, constitutes neither necessity nor determination in relation to God.
He provides a rigorous defense of the intimately related classical doctrines of both divine
impassibility and divine perfection, and rules out any possibility of growth, change or
responsiveness in God, for such expressions of mutability would undermine utterly the
orthodox understanding of God and the divine nature.653 ‘God in se is not determined by
creation and, consequently, evil does not enter into our understanding of the divine
essence.’654 Aligning himself with Hart’s thought, Hege described God’s impassibility in
this way:
Simply defined, divine apatheia is pure activity, pure self-giving charity, pure agape. It is
the impassive, imperturbable dynamic ground of all being expressed most clearly in the
perichoresis of the three persons of the Trinity. It does not react or respond, nor does it
require or ‘need’ any finite objects for its activity but graciously engages them in freedom
without sacrificing the divine immutability…655
653 For a perceptive reflection on Hart's defense of the doctrine of divine impassibility, see Brent A.R.
Hege, "The Suffering of God? The Divine Love and the Problem of Suffering in Classical and Process-
Relational Theisms" (John Templeton Award for Theological Promise: Laureates Colloquium, 2010,
Heidelberg). Hege contrasts Hart's position with that of Catherine Keller, who adopts a form of process-
related theism. 654 Hart, "God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo," 2. 655 Hege, "Short The Suffering of God? The Divine Love and the Problem of Suffering in Classical and
Process-Relational Theisms." 8-9.
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By drawing on patristic thought and Eastern Orthodox mystical theology, Hart offers an
alternative to the inadequate responses to evil and suffering, articulated by theists and
atheists alike, affirming the traditional divine attributes and presenting a vision of God’s
goodness in the midst of human peril and pain: ‘Hart suggests that divine perfection
provides an anchor, an unwavering point of reference, for the tempest tossed pilgrim to
assure her that all will be well when God’s victory over the enemies of God has been
won.’656 As I will discuss more fully below, although Hart seeks to hold together the reality
of human suffering in the face of natural disasters with the love of God, in his impassibility,
for all of creation, it is questionable whether his writing constitutes an effective theodicy.
Hart acknowledges that the issue of suffering leads significant numbers of people to reject
the possibility of God’s existence. However, the response that he offers to this concern
may fall short of offering a convincing basis for faith in the face of moral evil.
Despite Hart’s important insights in relation to the problem of evil, questions have been
raised about the effectiveness of Hart’s writing on human suffering. Several reviewers of
The Doors of the Sea have discerned in this work a rather awkward and ill-conceived effort
to engage with an issue that, because of the hugely problematic task faced by those who
seek to examine the question of human suffering from a position of faith, may well be best
left alone. Hart, indeed, in the book, starts by renouncing the pious platitudes that
sometimes follow catastrophic natural events, calls for silence and states that ‘we probably
ought not to speak.’657 Yet, he fails to heed his own advice and, far from remaining silent,
concludes that, in fact, he ‘must speak.’658 Heedless of the many anti-theodicy positions,
which have been adopted from theologians such as Kenneth Surin, Donald MacKinnon,
D.Z. Phillips and Rowan Williams, Hart enters into a sustained examination of the problem
of evil, which characterises the matter as an intellectual, rather than a pastoral, one, and
within which the victim’s plight seems to be rather marginalised.659 Thus, his focus is on
656 Hege, "Short The Suffering of God? The Divine Love and the Problem of Suffering in Classical and
Process-Relational Theisms." 7. 657 DS, 6. 658 DS, 6. 659 Tim Middleton, "Objecting to Theodicy and the Legitimacy of Protesting Against Evil," Science &
Christian Belief 29, no. 1 (2017): 8-12.
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the object of evil and not on those who are blighted by it. And in his appropriately orthodox
stance on the impassibility of God, the human suffering of Christ, which might be a helpful
way of connecting the trauma of those involved in the Boxing Day tsunami to the
incarnation of God within the world, is overlooked. The result is a position that gives
insufficient attention to the human dimension of suffering and the consequent expressions
of lament that natural disasters precipitate. In the wake of atrocious events, such as the
Indian Ocean tsunami, questions surface inevitably in connection with how it could happen
or, more pointedly, how God could let it happen. Yet, as Nelson concludes, the Doors of
the Sea is ‘far from a satisfying answer to these kinds of questions,’ and merely serves to
offer reflections in a ‘frequently bizarre and obfuscating idiom.’660 Although Hart is
hesitant about the value of theodicies, he does seek to develop one himself, which is centred
on the impassibility of God. The shortcoming of his approach, however, is its lack of
attention to the pastoral problem of human suffering.
3.6 Conclusion
Hart is a very creative thinker who has made an important contribution to Christian
theology through his writing. He offers a rich vision of the trinitarian God by unfolding a
dense theological project based on the notions of infinity, beauty, peace and goodness. He
focuses on Christ as the form of God’s revelation in the world, a presence within which
human creatures are able to participate through their sharing in God’s presence in the world
(methexis). The ontology of peace that the kingdom of God announced by Christ ushers in
is, Hart holds, the only enduring and health-giving alternative to the currents of violence
that have bedevilled the modern world and which he traces, philosophically, into
postmodern thought. His work, as I have shown, includes an engagement with atheism and
unbelief in contemporary Western society, particular in the species of atheism known as
New Atheism. Unfortunately, however, there are some problematic elements and several
660 Derek Nelson, "The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? by David Bentley Hart," Book
Review, Dialog: A Journal of Theology 48, no. 4 (2009): 395.
175
shortcomings in Hart’s work that render it less effective than he would wish it to be in
addressing the climate of unbelief in society today.
With respect to the key issue being explored in this thesis, namely the possibility of
dialogue between Christianity and atheism, Hart’s work provides many important
resources that offer opportunities for a constructive engagement between the Church and
atheistic thought to be advanced. Indeed, there are important strands in his thought that the
Church may be able to draw on as it seeks to address the challenges presented by its
position within the climate of numerical decline and the loss of faith that characterises
much of the Western world. These elements include Hart’s thoroughgoing and insightful
reflections on God’s identity with infinity; his rigorously worked out theology of both
divine transcendence and divine apatheia; his creation-focused approach to the Christian
story; the attention that he gives to beauty, truth, and goodness as dimensions of human
experience within which God’s presence in the world may be discerned; his rejection of
the doctrine of hell and his affirmation of universal salvation; and the fact that he does
recognise, at least in some expressions of atheistic thought (notably in Nietzsche), currents
of truth and modes of intelligent dissent that the Church needs to be heedful of. Some of
Hart’s ideas will, consequently, be returned to in the final chapter of this thesis where I
will offer a number of proposals for how Christianity and atheism may enter into dialogue
will be explored.
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Chapter 4:
Henri de Lubac’s response
to atheism and unbelief
4.1 The Christian vision in the context of
unbelief
The French Jesuit Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) is considered to be one of the most
important theologians of the previous century and is a pivotal figure in twentieth-century
Catholic thought.661 In the context of this thesis, I regard de Lubac as holding particular
importance because of the great interest he had in atheism throughout his life, which is
reflected in many of the articles and books that he wrote during his career. I will show that
de Lubac’s concerns with atheism and unbelief are more tightly focused than those of
Jüngel and Hart. Although he offers a fascinating critique of the ‘Religion of Humanity’
developed by August Comte, who might be regarded as a proto-Type I atheist, de Lubac’s
principal focus is on the thought of Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche, who all demonstrate
Type II atheist tendencies. Like both Jüngel and Hart, de Lubac is also sensitive to the role
of the Church in creating the conditions that made atheism and unbelief inevitable. In this
context, his significance stems from the deep concern that surfaces early in his career
concerning the inability of the Catholicism of his times, due to its narrow theological
661 De Lubac has exerted a considerable influence on Christian theology that extends well beyond
Catholicism. For a discussion of de Lubac's reception among Protestants and an exploration of his
understanding of and engagement with Protestant thinkers, see Kenneth Oakes, "Henri de Lubac and
Protestantism," in T&T Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac, ed. Jordan Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury,
2017).
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vision, to engage effectively with the social and spiritual crises of twentieth-century
Europe.
De Lubac was a leading figure in a movement that sought to revitalise the Catholic
Church through the act of ressourcement. This initiative sought to recover an authentic
Catholicism through the translation, study and explication of the works of the Church
Fathers662 and also by close attention to the thought of Thomas Aquinas. De Lubac and
other theologians who were associated with this development were described, mainly by
their detractors, as nouvelle théologiens.663 De Lubac’s work was to arouse suspicion and
condemnation within the Catholic hierarchy, particularly after the promulgation of the
encyclical Humani generis in 1950.
In this chapter I will focus on de Lubac’s thought concerning the question of atheism,
which is unquestionably indispensable for an understanding of his theological project as a
whole.664 As well as discussing his lament over the loss of a sense of the sacred within
contemporary society and what he sees as the affaisement spiritual (spiritual decline)
amongst Christians, I will also consider his constructive perspectives on the phenomenon
of unbelief, which were to gain expression in several of the constitutions issued by the
Second Vatican Council.665 Questions of unbelief, culture, history, interreligious dialogue,
662 The works were published in the series known as Sources chrétiennes (Christian Sources), which by
1999 had grown to more than 440 volumes. They were edited by de Lubac along with his fellow Jesuit,
Jean Daniélou. See Rudolf Voderholzer, Meet Henri de Lubac: His Life and Work (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 2008), 50-51; see also Jacob W. Wood, "Ressourcement," in T&T Clark Companion to Henri de
Lubac, ed. Jordan Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 663 The movement they belonged to, which is generally regarded as flourishing in the period between 1935
and 1960, is known as La Nouvelle Théologie. This was a term that was first coined by the anti-modernist
Dominican theologian, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange. See Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, "Where is the New
Theology Leading Us?," Catholic Family News Reprint Series 309 (1998). This is a translation of the
article originally published by Garrigou-Lagrange as ‘La nouvelle theologie où va-t-elle?’ just after the
Second World War: Angelicum, 23 (1946), 126-45. In the article, Garrigou-Lagrange asserts that the
nouvelle théologiens were leading the church to perdition. It should be noted that de Lubac himself resisted
the application of the label and never used it to describe his project. See Henri de Lubac, At the Service of
the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that Occasioned his Writings (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1993), 361. 664 Patrick X. Gardner, "An Inhuman Humanism," in T&T Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac, ed. Jordan
Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 226. 665 See Aaron Riches, "Henri de Lubac and the Second Vatican Council," in T&T Clark Companion to
Henri de Lubac, ed. Jordan Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
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the social role of the Church, the Eucharist, scriptural exegesis, mystery,666 paradox,
ontology, and the common destiny of humanity are all central concerns of de Lubac, and
these run as strands within an interwoven chord through a literary corpus that includes
nearly forty published works. His key texts include: Catholicisme: Les aspects sociaux du
dogme,667 De la connaissance de Dieu,668 Surnaturel: études historiques,669 Augustisme et
théologie moderne,670 Le Mystere du surnaturel671 and Petite catéchèse sur nature et
grâce.672 De Lubac also published an important work on atheism, which will be explored
later in this chapter: Le drame de l'humanisme athée.673 Additionally, his output includes
significant contributions to a Christian theology of religion,674 a Christian response to
Nazism,675 works on ecclesiology, the Christian faith and scriptural exegesis,676 short
studies of Christian paradoxes,677 biographical and theological studies of a number of
666 At the heart of de Lubac's hermeneutical project is a conviction that Christian faith is centred on a
unfied 'mystery' to which believers ascend, but never fully grasp. Kevin Storer, Reading Scripture to Hear
God: Kevin Vanhoozer and Henri De Lubac on God's use of Scripture in the Economy of Redemption
(Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 73. 667 Henri de Lubac, Catholicism : Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard
and Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988). Hereafter, this work is referred to as C. 668 Henri de Lubac, The Discovery of God, trans. Alexander Dru (Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans,
1996). Hereafter, this work is referred to as DG. 669 Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: etudes historiques (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1991), Hereafter, this work
is referred to as S. 670 Henri de Lubac, Augustinianism and Modern Theology, trans. Lancelot Capel Sheppard (London: G.
Chapman, 1969). Hereafter, this work is referred to as AMT. 671 Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Crossroad, 1998).
Hereafter, this work is referred to as MS. 672 Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, trans. Richard Arnandez (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1984). Hereafter, this work is referred to as BC. 673 de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism. Hereafter, this work is referred to as DAH. 674 Henri de Lubac, Aspects of Buddhism (London: Sheed and Ward, 1953); Henri de Lubac, La rencontre
du Bouddhisme et de l'occident (Paris, 1952). In addition to these works, de Lubac includes several
penetrating pieces on the plurality of religious expression in his collection of occasional articles: Henri de
Lubac, Theological Fragments, trans. Rebecca Howell Balinski (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989). 675 Henri de Lubac, Resistance chretienne au nazisme (Paris: Cerf, 2006). 676 Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church, trans. Michael Mason (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1999); Henri de Lubac, The Motherhood of the Church, trans. Sergia Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1982); Henri de Lubac, The Church: Paradox and Mystery, trans. James R. Dunne (Shannon, Ire:
Ecclesia Press, 1969); Henri de Lubac, Christian Faith: An Essay on the Structure of the Apostles' Creed,
trans. Illtyd Trethowan and John Saward (London: Chapman, 1986); Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum:
The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, trans. Gemma Simmonds (London: SCM, 2006); Henri
de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids, Mich:
W.B. Eerdmans, 1998). 677 Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, trans. Ernest Beaumont (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987);
Henri de Lubac, More Paradoxes, trans. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002).
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important thinkers,678 a study of the relationship between Christian dogma and history,679
and works that collect short pieces and reflections on a range of theological and religious
topics.680
4.2 The relationship between nature and
grace
4.2.1 Opposition to neoscholasticism
De Lubac began his novitiate within the Jesuit order in 1913, although his training was
interrupted by the First World War. This experience exposed de Lubac to a variety of
religious positions amongst the soldiers he served with, ranging from ardent faith through
indifference to atheism.681 Because of the expulsion in 1902 of religious teaching
communities from France, de Lubac’s philosophical and theological training was initially
undertaken at St Mary’s College, Canterbury, on Jersey, in Hastings, and at St Leonards-
on-Sea, before the Jesuit order was able to resume its presence at the scholasticate at
Fourvière near Lyon.
The years of training following demobilisation were formative ones for de Lubac as he
was exposed to the rigidly conservative and fiercely anti-modernist neoscholastic thought
678 Henri de Lubac, Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and his Meaning (New York: New American Library,
1965); Henri de Lubac, The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin (New York: Image Books, 1967); Henri de
Lubac, The Eternal Feminine: A Study on the Poem by Teilhard de Chardin, followed by Teilhard and the
Problems of Today, trans. René d Hague (London: Collins, 1971); Henri de Lubac, La postérité spirituelle
de Joachim de Flore (Paris: Lethielleux, 1978); Henri de Lubac, The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of
Proudhon, trans. Canon R. E. Scantlebury (London: Sheed and Ward, 1948); Henri de Lubac, Pic de la
Mirandole: etudes et discussions (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1974). 679 Henri de Lubac, Theology in History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996). 680 de Lubac, Theological Fragments; de Lubac, At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on
the Circumstances that Occasioned his Writings. Hereafter, this work is referred to as ASC. 681 These conversations were to provide the inspiration for de Lubac's book The Discovery of God. See de
Lubac, At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that Occasioned his
Writings, 42.
180
that dominated French Catholic theology at the time. This theological culture, derived from
Aristotelian categories and language, was marked by a form of ‘extrinsicism.’ De Lubac
refers to such a position as a ‘separated theology.’682 This led to apologetics being reduced
to a rational, rather than mystical, demonstration of the credibility of the Christianity.683
In this theological framework, an appeal is made to an order of pure nature (natura pura)
that is abstracted from humanity’s supernatural finality such that grace is regarded as
extrinsic to, rather than imprinted within, human nature. This teaching was profoundly
infused with Suárezian and Molinist684 orthodoxy and characterised by the adoption of
abstract rationalism, the application of intellectual proofs, and a sharp separation between
the orders of nature and grace. It also reflected the dominant influence of the Italian
Dominican theologian, Thomas Cajetan (1469-1534), particularly in connection with his
interpretation of Aquinas.685 Cajetan’s Thomism involved a two-storey conception of
reality with the self-sufficient natural order lying ‘beneath’ an entirely separate
supernatural realm. It was a theological climate that decoupled nature from grace, reduced
theological formation to the rote learning of formulae, known as manualistic training, was
rigidly authoritarian and marked by a degree of spiritual aridity.686 De Lubac characterises
this approach to the theological enterprise as disproportionately abstract, lacking in depth
and characterised by a misleading superficiality.
The issue of theology’s excessive rationalism, positivism, pettiness and defensiveness,
all of which lead it to fail to engage with the profound mystery of Christian doctrine and
682 Henri de Lubac, Memoire sur l'occasion de mes ecrits, 2e ed. rev. et augm. ed. (Namur: Culture et
verite, 1992), 188. 683 Jordan Hillebert, "Introducing Henri de Lubac," in T&T Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac, ed.
Jordan Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 8. 684 Luis de Molina (1535-1600) sought to reconcile the absolute sovereignty of God and the liberty of the
human will by introducing the notion of scientia media: a knowledge midway between God’s knowledge
of actually existent beings, past, present, and future, and God’s knowledge of purely possible being. 685 As Milbank notes in his text on de Lubac, ‘Cajetan… says that human nature in actuality is fully
definable in merely natural terms. This means that there can be an entirely natural and adequate ethics,
politics, and philosophy and so forth.’ John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the
Debate Concerning the Supernatural (London: SCM Press, 2005), 17. 686 Referring to this approach to the formation of clergy, de Lubac notes ‘To anyone… who consults the
plan of the manuals in use and their tables of contents, it quickly becomes apparent that the proportions of
the doctrinal edifice are at times poorly balanced: certain parts are hypertrophied; others, on the other hand,
are greatly reduced.’ See Henri de Lubac, "Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred," in Theological
Fragments (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 227.
181
the depths of the divine-human relationship, is boldly expressed in de Lubac’s first
published article, ‘Apologetics and Theology.’687 In addition to tidying up the profound
mysteries of the gospel, de Lubac holds that neoscholasticism also promotes a perspective
that isolates humanity from divinity and drives a wedge between philosophy and theology.
This theological orientation was, de Lubac notes, undergirded by the influence of Jansenist
thought, which played an important role in shaping the intellectual climate of the French
Church during the nineteenth century.688 In three key works689 de Lubac writes at length
about the principle of pure nature advanced by Baius and Jansenius, in order to recover the
authentic spirit of Augustine’s thought. After offering a sustained critique of the failure to
understand the relationship between nature and grace by both these thinkers, de Lubac
traces in the thought of Augustine the presence of grace in the divine act of creation through
the imago Dei and asserts that the doctrine of pure nature is a perversion of Augustine’s
theology.690
After their disastrous separation, in a development that made secularisation virtually
inevitable, de Lubac draws on ancient sources through the process of ressourcement in
order to reintegrate nature and grace.691 In de Lubac’s major work, Surnaturel, which has
yet to be translated into English, he argues against the calamitous notion of ‘pure nature’
and develops a theology based on the ‘natural’ (both human and non-human) being, which
is ordered so that it participates in God.692 It is also in this work that de Lubac asserts that
theological extrinsicism paves the way for modern secularism in that it isolates the
supernatural from the mundane physical realm of natural action and experience. For de
Lubac, there is a double danger in theological extrinsicism: pure humanism without
687 de Lubac, "Apologetics and Theology,” in Theological Fragments, 91-104. San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1989. 688 David Grumett, "De Lubac, Grace, and the Pure Nature Debate," Modern Theology 31, no. 1 (2015):
125-26. 689 Surnaturel, The Mystery of the Supernatural and Augustinianism and Modern Theology. 690 For de Lubac, the only way of correcting the distortions introduced by Baius, Jansenius and their
successors is to appropriate once again the thought of Augustine. S, 157-83; AMT, 235-77; MS, 19, 22. 691 John Webster, "Theologies of Retrieval," in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. John
Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain R. Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 588. 692 De Lubac notes that in this work he wanted to ‘present a sort of essay in which contact between
Catholic theology and contemporary thinking could be restored.’ de Lubac, At the Service of the Church:
Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that Occasioned his Writings, 34.
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reference beyond humanity and of the illusory piety of a religion without humanity
produced by the neoscholastic understanding of grace.693
Following the encyclical, Aeterni Patris, neoscholasticism became the official doctrine
of the Catholic Church and was adopted by the Magisterium in sharp opposition to
Modernism, which was characterised by the adoption of Enlightenment rationality,
epistemology and ethics; positivism in science and philosophy; a worldview that eschewed
the supernatural order of reality; and the application of historical-critical methods in the
study of Scripture that were based on naturalistic assumptions. Pope Pius X strengthened
the place of neoscholasticism in official Catholic teaching by issuing a Syllabus of Errors,
and then issued the encyclical, Pascendi Dominici gregis, in 1907, which sought to repel
threats emerging from Modernism, both within and outside the Church.694 Following the
formal ratification of the propositions as the basis for the training of Catholic clergy in the
new Code of Canon Law, published in 1917, neoscholasticism was established as an all-
embracing dogmatic system that defined the doctrinal and methodological framework
within which formation for the Catholic priesthood was to be situated.695 Many early and
mid-twentieth century Jesuit and Dominican thinkers sought to oppose the dualistic
theological climate associated with neoscholasticism by overturning what they saw as a
grotesque distortion of Thomism through a return to the Fathers and Aquinas, and by
focusing on the concrete existential circumstances of lived human experience. An early
force in this movement was Pierre Rousselot. Indeed, the imprint of Rousselot’s thought
can be seen in several of de Lubac’s key works, which reject the notion of a state of pure
nature, introduced into theology by Cajetan and others, and which affirm the intrinsic
orientation of humanity toward the divine by stressing the natural desire in all people
(whether recognised or not) for God.696
693 John Milbank, "Henri de Lubac," in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in
the Twentieth Century ed. David Ford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 82. 694 Robert Royal, A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015), 123-27. 695 Tracey Rowland, "Neo-scholasticism of the Strict Observance," in T&T Clark Companion to Henri de
Lubac, ed. Jordan Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 696 John M. McDermott, "De Lubac and Rousselot," Gregorianum 78, no. 4 (1997).
183
Another seminal influence on the Nouvelle Théologie movement was the proto-
existentialist philosopher, Maurice Blondel (1861-1949). Blondel’s key work, based on his
doctoral thesis, L’Action,697 develops an existentialist phenomenology grounded on the
premise that humans are marked by an intrinsic and indelible orientation toward the
supernatural. He argues that simply by acting, thinking and living, each person admits a
tacit affirmation of the secret and active presence of the transcendent God in their life.698
The work seeks to unite faith and science by eschewing both intellectualism and fideism
and, in so doing, embraces the concept of action in order to demonstrate the necessity of
the supernatural order within the natural domain and so maintain a position that is faithful
to the tradition of the Fathers of the Church.699
Blondel develops an integrated and systematic approach to the question of human
existence, which he argues consistently owes its ultimate end to God; human destiny must
always be seen to end with the supernatural. Central to Blondel’s thought is a ‘philosophy
of insufficiency.’700 Developing Augustine’s notion of the cor inquietum (restless heart),
he preoccupies himself with human destiny and holds that all people are confronted with
the choice of either embracing or rejecting transcendence. Blondel believes, however, that
it is only when the human person orients their life toward the supernatural that they will
find existential fulfilment.701 In advancing this thesis, Blondel has to repudiate
neoscholasticism, which he claims undermines authentic Catholic thought, fails to address
the challenges of modernity and is, in fact, as de Lubac also holds, the very cause of
697 Maurice Blondel, L'action: Essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique etonnant
(Paris: Alcan, 1893). 698 Stephen Bullivant, The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 61. 699 For an overview of Blondel's thought and a discussion of his inflence on de Lubac and other Jesuits, see
Jon Kirwan, An Avant-garde Theological Generation: The Nouvelle Theologie and the French Crisis of
Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2, 51-64, 108-27. 700 Blondel speaks of the 'supernatural insufficiency of human nature.' Maurice Blondel, The Letter on
Apologetics, and, History and dogma, trans. A. Dru and I. Trethowan (London: Harvill P, 1964), 141. By
this, he means that humans are confronted with their inability to find ultimate satisfaction within the natural
world and that they must therefore reach beyond themselves – always in response to a pre-existent action of
divine grace – to a transcendent end. 701 Kirwan, An Avante-garde Theological Generation, 52-53.
184
secularism. Neo-scholastic theologians attacked Blondel’s thought, accusing him of
Kantian immanentism.702
In response, de Lubac and the other Fourvière Jesuits became disciples of Blondel703
and used Blondel’s proto-existentialist philosophy of transcendence as the starting point
for their own attacks on neoscholasticism and for the development of an alternative
theological perspective.704 This is one that, drawing on the thought of the Fathers, rejects
abstract rationalism and instead emphasises history, the concrete experience of humanity,
pre-conceptual, paradoxical, and mystical approaches to our relationship with God, and the
intrinsic desire of all human creatures for the beatific vision.705 For Blondel, neither
intellectual (or propositional) atheism, which is based on lack of belief in God, nor an
existential, lived and practical atheism that is founded on a refusal of God and a failure to
allow oneself to be enveloped by mystery, are tenable. De Lubac believes that, although
one can think of oneself as an atheist, the rejection of false conceptions of an authentic
God on the one hand, and, on the other, a life based on ethical principles, will, in fact,
unwittingly give honour to God.706 Blondel’s position, particularly as it was interpreted by
de Lubac, is one that has considerable potential as a starting point for the development of
a constructive dialogue between Christianity and atheism.
702 This prompted Blondel to set out his defense in a series of articles entitled ‘Lettre sur les exigences de la
pensee contemporaine en matière d’Apologetique.’ 703 De Lubac discusses the impact of Blondel on his own thought in de Lubac, Theological Fragments,
377-403; and de Lubac, At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that
Occasioned his Writings, 19-26. A more detailed exploration of Blondel's role in shaping de Lubac's
theology is provided in Francesca Murphy, "The Influence of Maurice Blondel," in T&T Clark Companion
to Henri de Lubac, ed. Jordan Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); see also Myles B Hannan, "Maurice
Blondel: The Philosopher of Vatican II," The Heythrop Journal 56, no. 6 (2015). 704 This group, in addition to de Lubac, included Gaston Fessard, Jean-Guenolé-Marie Daniélou, René
d'Ouince, Alfred de Soras, Auguste Valensin and Jean Zupan. See Kirwan, An Avant-garde Theological
Generation, 7. 705 ‘God is above all things’ and is ‘anterior even to conceptual thought.’ DG, 127. 706Bullivant, The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology, 61.
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4.2.2 The desire for God and the supernatural finality of
humanity
At the heart of de Lubac’s efforts to revitalise Catholic theology in ways that are rooted in
the tradition of the Fathers and the thought of Thomas Aquinas707 is a conviction that the
divine mystery can only be understood by recovering the unity of the doctrines of creation
and redemption; the cosmos is created in, through and for Jesus Christ.708 Human nature
contains the imprint of divinity – the imago Dei – and this instils in all people an orientation
toward, and desire for, God.709 Such a perspective is clearly at odds with the notion of
natura pura and, consequently, de Lubac rejects a dualistic conception of nature and grace
as if the gift of God’s presence is ‘super-added’ to a pure nature that is altogether isolated
from its divine source. It is entirely wrong, he argues, to derive from Aquinas any
suggestion that human nature could have attributed to it an exclusively natural or
proportionate ultimate end. In his seminal work, Surnaturel: études historiques, published
in 1946, de Lubac demonstrates how Thomas’ thought had been obscured and
misrepresented and that his notion that God had created humans with an ultimate end that
is ordained with beatitude and which is therefore beyond the power of human nature and,
instead, given solely through divine grace, had been wilfully neglected by neoscholastic
theologians.710
Following his reading of Thomas, and stemming also from his adoption of Blondel’s
philosophically rigorous defense of the intrinsic connection between the natural and the
supernatural that characterises the essence of human creatures, de Lubac holds that this
707 The relationship between the thought of Thomas Aquinas and Henri de Lubac on the question of nature
and grace is explored in some detail in Jacob W. Wood, To Stir a Restless Heart: Thomas Aquinas and
Henri de Lubac on Nature, Grace, and the Desire for God (Washington: Catholic University of America
Press, 2019). 708 See Colossians 1.15-20. 709 In a letter to Maurice Blondel, written on 3rd April 1932, de Lubac asks: ‘How can a conscious spirit be
anything other than an absolute desire for God?’ 710 Mansini describes Surnaturel as 'the most influential event in Catholic theology of the twentieth century.
Guy Mansini, "The Abiding Theological Significance of Henri de Lubac's Surnaturel," The Thomist: A
Speculative Quarterly Review 73, no. 4 (2009): 593; see also Philip J Donnelly, "The Surnaturel of P. Henri
de Lubac, SJ," Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings of the Third
Annual Convention (June 28-30, 1948) (1948).
186
natural desire to see the essence of God is a sign that human nature has been created so that
it reaches its fulfilment through communion with God. This human nature, created in God’s
image, is capax Dei, ontologically ordered in the very act of creation toward the beatific
vision.711 Yet it is a communion that is possible only, as Thomas puts it, ‘from another’s
bestowing,’712 that is, through the gratuitous gift of God. God, then, ‘denies the gods of
our desires, but… is nonetheless the sole God of human desire.’713 To underline this, de
Lubac draws on Saint Ephrem.714 The divine orientation of each person is, in de Lubac’s
terms, an ‘image,’ an ‘imprint,’ or a ‘seal,’ and constitutes the mark of God upon us. This
‘natural desire to see God’ (as Thomas puts it) is intrinsic to humanity through the
ordination of creation, although it can only ever be actuated by God in order to bring to
each person the perfect happiness that the natural order is unable to bestow.715 Supernatural
finality can therefore never be constructed by any person but is an ineradicable component
of our true selves and is the condition of our ability to know and to respond to God.
Nicholas Healy condenses de Lubac’s position on the connection between nature and
grace in the form of five interrelated theses, which set out the human creature’s relation to
God.716 Firstly, de Lubac asserts that as created by God and for God, the ultimate end of
human nature is supernatural beatitude. This truth, de Lubac points out runs from the
Fathers through the whole Christian tradition.717 Aquinas underlines this same principle:
‘The ultimate end of an intellectual creature is the vision of God in His essence.’718 For
both these authors, as with de Lubac, this supernatural finality is given by God ab initio,
711 Reinhard Hütter, ‘Aquinas on the Natural Desire for the Vision of God: A Relecture of Summa Contra
Gentiles III, c. 25 apres Henri de Lubac,’ The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 73, no. 4 (2009):
588. 712 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1, q. 62, a. 4. 713 DG, 6. 714 ‘Our spirit bears the imprint of inscrutable Nature through the mystery within it.’ DG, 7. 715 MS, 183. 716 Nicholas J. Healy, "The Christian Mystery of Nature and Grace," in T&T Clark Companion to Henri de
Lubac, ed. Jordan Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 188-95. 717 It is famously expressed in Augustine’s statement: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are
restless until they find their rest in you.’Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin
Books, 1961), I, 1. 718 Thomas Aquinas, The Light of Faith: The Compendium of Theology (New York: Book-of-the Month-
Club, 1998), 104.
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in the very act in which humans beings are created in the image of God. Alternatively,
‘nature was made for the supernatural.’719 Secondly, as already noted, the ultimate end of
human nature can never be achieved by human effort; it is radically beyond our innate
power. For this reason, the final end of human nature can only be brought about through
the gift of divine grace. Thirdly, there is, in every human person, a natural desire to see the
essence of God,720 which is a sign that human nature was created in the image of God and
destined, in conformity with de Lubac’s first thesis, for eternal blessedness with God.721
Fourthly, de Lubac acknowledges that, hypothetically, God could have created intellectual
natures that are not destined for supernatural beatitude. Finally, the affirmation of an
ultimate end of human nature which is supernatural does not involve a denial that nature
also has a ‘proportionate’ natural end. De Lubac’s position, as summarised in these theses,
is clearly in fundamental opposition to the ‘extrinsic’ theological axioms of
neoscholasticism, which segregate the orders of the natural and the supernatural. ‘Man’s
calling… means the calling of man (vocatio hominis) is not only human, but also divine.’722
4.3 Engagements with atheism and unbelief
4.3.1 The roots of atheism and secularism
De Lubac was acutely aware of the erosion of faith in Europe and, in particular in his own
nation, France. He lamented the loss of a connection with the sacred, belief in God, and
the triumphalist philosophical positions that seek to replace God with humanity. In the
aftermath of the French Revolution, Catholicism had been repressed and efforts had been
made to exclude religion in any shape or form from public affairs and culture in France.723
719 de Lubac, Theology in history, 231. 720 The visio beatifica. 721 This orientation is an intrinsic openness to a mystery that infinitely surpasses nature. It is, for de Lubac,
‘essentially in nature and expresses the heart of it.’ (S, 487) 722 Total Meaning of Man in the World, 614. 723 Royal, A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, 189.
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Furthermore, the growing threats of liberalism, materialism, socialism and atheism eroded
Catholicism’s loss of temporal authority in Europe and forced a succession of popes to
redefine the Church in opposition to the trend towards secularisation. This task was,
however, a very difficult one to fulfil as anticlericalism and Gallicanism intensified and
the ancien régime, within which a close relationship between Church and state had
developed, saw its status weakened considerably. Conservative papal resistance to
secularism reached a new height during the papacy of Leo XIII, who, as was noted earlier
in this chapter, sought to realise ultramontane objectives, which advocated supreme papal
authority in matters of faith and discipline, by issuing the encyclicals Aeterni Patris (1879)
and Rerum Novarum (1891). Alas, Leo’s calls for a Thomistic revival did little to
strengthen either the theological rhetoric or social status of the Catholic Church and the
formal adoption of neoscholasticism, the introduction of the clerical oath, and the adoption
of the Latin manuals in the formation of its clergy, created an austere climate within the
Church. As O’Meara notes, ‘its ability to inspire Christian life or to address concrete moral
issues was limited.’724
De Lubac holds that the focus in neoscholastic thought on epistemological justifications
for the Thomist system means that theology is unable to engage effectively with the
atheistic philosophies prevailing in European consciousness. The theological extrinsicism
that he was exposed to in his own training led to apologetics being cut off from the content
of Christian faith.725 This results, he argues, in Catholic apologetics being captivated by ‘a
kind of unavowed rationalism, which had been reinforced for a century by the invasion of
positivist tendencies.’726 Apologetics, he asserts, falls far short of the Church’s great
tradition and in its superficiality simply fails to show how Christian dogma is a ‘source of
universal light.’727 As a result, an increasing number of people across Europe chose to
reject the Church and its teachings. In tandem with the loss of the sacred within society, de
724 Thomas F. O'Meara, Church and Culture: German Catholic Theology, 1860-1914 (University of Notre
Dame Press, 1991), 189. 725 Bryan C. Hollon, Everything is Sacred: Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac
(Eugene, Or: Cascade Books, 2009), 34. 726 de Lubac, "Apologetics and Theology," 93. 727 de Lubac, "Authority of the Church in Temporal Matters," 214.
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Lubac is conscious of the spiritual decline within the Church and thus amongst many
Christians.728 This process of spiritual weakening stems, he asserts, from an amnesia
regarding the Church’s tradition, which leads it to be open to distortion by ideologies that
seek to seize and disfigure it, the greatest example of which, in de Lubac’s own time, was
Nazism, to which many within the Catholic Church in France sadly acquiesced.729
Consequently, unbelief, de Lubac argues, is not restricted to those outside the Church but
‘also prevails within the ecclesiastical world as well.’730 Lamenting the often simplistic
and nominal faith of contemporary Catholics, he goes on to state:
There is an easily observable contrast in many men between their secular knowledge and
their religious instruction; the former is that of a grown man, who has studied for a long
time, who has specialised in some professional skill, who knows life, who is cultivated; the
second has remained that of a child, wholly elementary, rudimentary, a mixture of childish
imagination, poorly assimilated abstract notions, scraps of vague and disconnected
teachings gathered by chance from experience.731
The pervasiveness of such a superficial form of Christianity leads many to obliterate any
sense of mystery or profundity in their faith and to regard ‘Catholic’ merely as a label or
badge, rather than as a mark of the Church’s universality. Lifeless Christianity is, for de
Lubac, not just precipitated by intellectual and theological errors that stem from
neoscholasticism. In his essay, ‘Christian Explanation of Our Times,’ he also traces the
erosion of Christian consciousness to privatisation in matters of faith.
As we have seen, de Lubac holds that unbelief and secularism have theological, as well
as cultural and philosophical, roots. He believes that the breakdown of the traditional
dogmatic synthesis of nature and grace, as elaborated by the Fathers and by Aquinas, led
to the notion that nature and the supernatural are each self-contained orders, with the one
728 See Henri de Lubac, "Temptations Against the Church," Life of the Spirit (1946-1964) 7, no. 84 (1953);
and Henri de Lubac, "Temptations Against the Church - II," Life of the Spirit (1946-1964) 8, no. 85 (1953). 729 Henri de Lubac, De Lubac: A Theologian Speaks, trans. Angelo Scola (Los Angeles, Calif: Twin Circle,
1985), 1-2. 730 de Lubac, "Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred," 225. 731 de Lubac, "Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred," 225.
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added to the other. The consequences of this theological extrinsicism are the separation of
being and Christian life, of the world and the Church, and of reason and faith. Thus, for de
Lubac, the neoscholastic conceptualisation of the relationship between nature and grace
amounts to an extrinsicism that leaves nature wholly divorced from God and creates the
conditions that make possible, or even inevitable, atheist humanism.732 De Lubac traces
this dualistic conception from Baianism to the modernist immanentism of the twentieth
century and, with Congar, denounces it as the ‘disease of modern Catholicism [which has]
blinded us to the full character of the desire of nature.’733 In Surnaturel and in other later
works that develop the thesis set out in this key text, de Lubac argues that it is the
neoscholastic notion of pure nature, which holds that nature has an integrity apart from the
supernatural, that leads to the flattening of conceptions of humanity, and an extrinsicism
in theology that regards grace as added externally to humanity as a closed and sufficient
whole. For this reason, neoscholasticism, in de Lubac’s view, is partly responsible for the
growth of immanentism, secularism, humanism and atheism.
De Lubac is not denying that there is a distinction between the natural and the
supernatural. He asserts, however, there remains an intimate relationship between them,
‘an ordination, a finality… nature was made for the supernatural, and, without having any
right over it, nature is not explained without it.’734 Problems emerge when this intimate
connection becomes broken in both theological and philosophical thought. The isolation
of the supernatural, which, as we have seen, de Lubac traces through the neoscholastic
distortion of the thought of the Fathers and of Aquinas, may have been advanced in order
to protect the supernatural from any contamination. Yet, the outcome is that it becomes
decoupled from the living spirit of human affairs and social life and, as a consequence,
leaves human society open to the invasion of secularism. This theological move ushers in
conceptions of progress and human maturity that are founded on a total secularisation that
732 Royal, A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, 191. 733 ‘… this gift [grace] presented itself as something superimposed, as an artificial superstructure, indeed as
an arbitrary imposition, and the nonbeliever had an easy time entrenching himself in his indifference
precisely on what theology told him… Today, this secularism, having often become atheistic and following
its own path, is trying to invade the consciousness of Christians themselves.’ Henri de Lubac, "The Total
Meaning of Man and the World," Communio: International Catholic Review 35 (2008): See 619-22. 734 de Lubac, "Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred," 231.
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amounts to the expulsion of God from social life, from culture and from the relationships
of private life. Furthermore, it generates a sense of human reality characterised by an
atheistic attitude in which human fullness is understood to be entirely independent of a
religious dimension.735
In addition to de Lubac’s exploration of the theological grounds for atheism and
unbelief, which highlight his sensitivity to the entanglement of atheism and theism and his
rejection of a simple binary opposition between these two positions, de Lubac also offers
some brief reflections on the problem of suffering. This is an issue that lies behind unbelief
for some, although not all, people. It should be noted that de Lubac does not develop a
systematic account of human evil neither does he attempt to present a coherent theodicy.
His discussion of this matter is mainly confined to the experience of suffering encountered
by Christians. His discussion of the issue is expressed within a number of fragmentary
remarks in his work Paradoxes of Faith.736 Through a series of compressed statements, de
Lubac acknowledges the agony of suffering, struggle and death as marks of the human
predicament. Nonetheless, citing John 16.20, he sees within suffering the possibility of
transfiguration and for the troubled Christian who is afflicted by sorrow, de Lubac
commends both prayer and the sacrament of confession. For suffering can, in the end, bring
a blessing as it frees us from sentimentality and offers a gateway into the love of God. And
recalling Pascal’s statement that ‘Jesus Christ will be in agony until the end of the world,’
de Lubac contemplates Jesus’ suffering as that under which the one who suffers can shelter.
Furthermore, with Augustine, de Lubac identifies evil as something that does not have a
positive reality: ‘It is an antagonistic force, the pure power of negation, of refusal, of
opposition, of revolt.’737
735 de Lubac, "The Total Meaning of Man and the World," 621-22. 736 de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, 171-89. 737 de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, 189.
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4.3.2 The consequences of atheist humanism
De Lubac’s most systematic and important work on the subject of unbelief was published
in 1944 as Le drame de l’humanisme athée.738 It is a key text in which he traces the self-
destruction of humanism, and, for this reason, it is of central importance in the context of
this thesis. It is particularly significant to the extent that it is representative of a notable
development in intellectual thought in the middle of the twentieth century, which was the
serious engagement of many Catholic theologians and philosophers with atheistic
thought.739 In the book de Lubac provides a detailed analysis of the thought of Feuerbach,
Nietzsche, Marx and Comte, as well as three fascinating chapters on the fictional atheists
that populate the pages of Dostoevsky’s greatest novels. Emerging from these engagements
is de Lubac’s central thesis, which is that absolute atheism ultimately leads to the absolute
enthronement of humanity. Throughout the work, de Lubac is most concerned, not with
reason-centred atheism, but various expressions of what he calls anti-theism, which have
as their common foundation the rejection of God.740 Such expressions of atheism form the
bedrock of an anti-theistic secular mentality and form of cultural organisation, which leads
to the complete negation of God and which inevitably has far-reaching and dramatic
consequences for humanity.741 It is marked by an absolute denial of God whilst its positive
character is marked by its deeply held anti-theism, a ‘belief system’ that demands complete
commitment from its adherents and which seeks to shift the course of human culture. It is
based on a deeply rooted confidence in human nature, the rejection of any form of divine
authority, and a desire that humanity take control, improve society and espouse both
intellectual and moral self-mastery.742 Yet, the outcome of a humanism founded on the
denial of God not only conceives of humanity in ways that are removed from the sense of
the sacred or of humanity’s transcendent orientation, it leads to the erosion of humanity
738 The Drama of Atheist Humanism. 739 See Stephen Bullivant, "From “Main Tendue” to Vatican II: The Catholic Engagement with Atheism
1936–1965," New Blackfriars 90, no. 1026 (2009): esp.181. 740 DAH, 12. This corresponds to the Type II form of atheism in the typology outlined in the opening
chapter of this thesis. 741 Jürgen Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie - New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of
Vatican II (London: T. & T. Clark, 2010), 96. 742 Hollon, Everything is Sacred: Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac, 15-16.
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itself. ‘... [T]he rejection of God is matched by a certain similarity in results, the chief of
which is the annihilation of the human person… Exclusive humanism is inhuman
humanism.’743 With respect to the typology of atheism that I outlined in Chapter 1, this
form of anti-theism resonates most closely with Type II atheism.
The Drama of Atheist Humanism, as its title suggests, is set out like a play. In the first
act, de Lubac explores the hostility against God that is held by many of the nineteenth
century’s most prominent atheists. De Lubac wrote this book not as a resentful reaction
against atheism. It is, rather, a serious effort to better understand the intellectual position
held by some of the most prominent atheists of the nineteenth century.744 Focusing on
Feuerbach, Nietzsche and Marx, de Lubac notes that these thinkers were not, primarily,
interested in the speculative question of God’s existence. Rather, their focus is on the
problem facing humanity.
The problem posed was a human problem – it was the human problem – and the solution
that is being given to it is one that claims to be positive. Man is getting rid of God in order
to regain possession of the human greatness that, it seems to him, is being unwarrantably
withheld by another. In God he is overthrowing an obstacle to gain his freedom.745
Modern humanism is, for de Lubac, built upon resentment (Nietzsche coined the term
ressentiment although the sense in which he uses this concept is rather different) and begins
with a choice, the choice to reject God and adopt a position of anti-theism. Drawing on his
study of the French politician and philosopher, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,746 he notes that,
for Proudhon, the cause of anti-theism is not, essentially, to do with God himself, but upon
a certain recourse to his authority.747 For Feuerbach, who, de Lubac argues, provides the
743 DAH, 12, 14. In characterising atheist humanism in this way, de Lubac anticipates the critique voiced
by Lévinas, see Emmanuel Lévinas, "On Maurice Blanchot," in Proper Names (London: Athlone, 1996),
127-28; see also Geroulanos, An atheism that is not humanist; Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie - New
Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II, 96. 744 Andreas Gonçalves Lind and Bruno Nobre, "(De)dramatizing Atheist Humanism: Henri de Lubac and
Emmanuel Falque in Dialogue," Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 76, no. 2/3 (2020): 933. 745 DAH, 24-25. 746 de Lubac, The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon. 747 DAH, 25.
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link between Hegel and Marx, the attributes humans assign to God are, in fact, those
belonging to humanity and, in so doing, ‘[man] impoverishes himself by enriching God…
he affirms in God what he denies in himself.’748 Thus, distilling Feuerbach’s thesis, de
Lubac states that ‘after the movement of the religious systole, by which man rejected
himself, he must now, by a movement of diastole, “take back into his heart that nature
which he had rejected.” The hour has at last struck when we must exorcise the phantom…
the kingdom of man has come.’749 This form of atheism is a positive atheism, based, as
Maritain puts it, ‘on an active struggle against everything that reminds us of God,’750 and
amounts to ‘anti-Christianism,’751 rather than a negative atheism that employs the rejection
of belief in God through the negation of a metaphysical assertion.752 It is, as we saw in
Chapter One, a Promethean atheism753 within which ‘man projects his being into
objectivity, thereby making himself an object to that image of himself now considered as
the Divine Subject.’754 So, for Feuerbach:
If the divinity of nature is the basis of all religions, including Christianity, the divinity of
man is its final aim… The turning point of history will be the moment when man becomes
aware that the only God of man is man himself. Homo homini Deus! [‘man is a God to
man!’]755
Feuerbach’s thought was taken up by Engels and Marx, who both believe that Feuerbach
makes the criticism of religion substantially complete,756 and argue that religion does not
make man but it is man that makes religion, and that its eradication is the precondition of
the emancipation of humanity.757 In another work, de Lubac is critical of the tendency that
748 DAH, 28-29. 749 DAH, 29. 750 Maritain, The Range of Reason, 104. 751 DAH, 12. 752 Jordan Hillebert, "The Death of God and the Dissolution of Humanity," New Blackfriars 95, no. 1060
(2014): 676-77; see also Palmer, "The Meaning of Atheism," 1-2. 753 Marx considered Prometheus to be the 'the noblest of saints and martyrs in the calendar of philosophy.'
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 15. 754 Hillebert, "The Death of God and the Dissolution of Humanity," 677. 755 DAH, 30. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 27. 756 DAH, 38. 757 DAH, 39-40.
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he observes in both Marxist and Fascist ideologies, which hold that humanity, through
science and technology, can wield an unlimited sway over nature and create its own
history. Such frameworks reduce us to an inextricable knot of natural relationships and
must, he argues, be resisted in order to recognise our ‘cosmic preparation’ and the divine
foundations of anthropology.758
De Lubac notes that Marx shares his own analysis of excessive individualism as
dehumanising. However, Marx only succeeds in replacing it with the opposite excess. This
is because Marx, by denying the existence of God and defining humanity entirely in terms
of ‘a network of social relations,’759 ends up abandoning any means of guaranteeing the
‘inviolable depths’ of the human person, which leaves the individual to derive their value
solely from its function within the social whole. Marx, in de Lubac’s view, sacrifices the
individual at the altar of an impersonal future.760 De Lubac is far more respectful of another
socialist, Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-65), than he is about Marx. Proudhon is sharply
critical of the Church and espouses a form of anti-theism based on opposition to God.761
However, de Lubac acknowledges that much of Proudhon’s criticism is justified. And,
despite his highly problematic relationship with Christianity, Proudhon was never without
a Bible and professed that the idea of God was both inescapable and universal.762
De Lubac deepens his exploration of anthropocentric atheism in his discussion of
Nietzsche and his notion of the ‘death of God,’ which occupies the remaining part of the
first act of The Drama. He notes that, for Nietzsche, God cannot ‘live’ anywhere but in the
human mind and that the way to get rid of God is ‘not so much to refute the proofs of his
existence as to show how such an idea came to be formed and how it succeeded in
758 De Lubac cites Leo the Great in order to underline this point: ‘O man, awaken! Know the dignity of thy
nature; remember that thou wert made in God’s own image.’ (BC, 15-18) Leo the Great, In Nativitate
Domini, sermo 7, 2 PL 54, 267-68. 759 C, 359. 760 DAH, 66; C, 359. Gardner, "An Inhuman Humanism," 236. 761 de Lubac, The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon, 207. 762 For de Lubac, Proudhon's anti-theism is not so much the denial of the idea of God as it is the
purification of this idea. De Lubac holds that this position should serve as a wake-up call to Christians. See
Voderholzer, Meet Henri de Lubac: His Life and Work, 147.
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establishing itself in the human mind and in “gaining weight” there.’763 This view, de
Lubac believes, is highly destructive, and he describes Nietzsche’s influence as eating
away ‘like an acid at the consciousness of our contemporaries.’764 As Jüngel does in God
as the Mystery of the World, de Lubac acknowledges that the phrase ‘the death of God’
does have some currency in theological reflection on the crucifixion and notes that
Nietzsche, with his Lutheran background, is likely to have heard Luther’s chorale,765 and
would have been aware of Hegel’s use of the notion.766 However, the meaning that
Nietzsche attaches to the relationship between God and death is, of course, quite new, and
de Lubac suggests that Nietzsche issues the phrase ‘God is dead,’ not as a statement of
fact, a lament or a piece of sarcasm, but as a choice. ‘It is an act. An act as definite and
brutal as those he himself was later to adopt.’767
I herald the coming of a tragic era… We must be prepared for a long succession of
demolition, devastation and upheavals… Europe will soon be enveloped in darkness; we
shall watch the rising of a black tide.768 Thanks to me, a catastrophe is at hand. A
catastrophe whose name I know, whose name I cannot tell… Then all the earth will writhe
in convulsion.769
Nietzsche’s prophecy was, of course, to be demonstrated in the atrocities experienced by
Europe during the twentieth century, in the carnage of two world wars, the horrors of the
Holocaust and through the devastating impact of fascist and communist regimes. In other
words, the ‘death of God’ announced by Nietzsche and the atheist humanism that it
763 DAH, 45-46. 764 DAH, 398. See also Henri de Lubac, Affrontements mystiques (Paris: Editions du Temoignage chretien,
1949), 12. 765 O grosse Not, Gott selbst ist tot (What a calamity, God himself is dead). 766 DAH, 47. 767 DAH, 48. 768 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 174. 769 DAH, 64.
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provoked had fatal repercussions for humanity.770 Atheism leads, de Lubac believes, to the
self-destruction of humanity, for ‘where there is no God, there is no man either.’771
In the second act of The Drama, de Lubac interprets atheist humanism as a form of
dépassement, or overtaking, foreshadowing a theme that would be more fully worked out
in his 1968 publication, Athéisme et sens de l’homme.772 For the atheist humanist in the
wake of Feuerbach, all theology is reducible to anthropology,773 since atheism presumes
an understanding of the Christian faith, even claiming that it can exalt its role, despite
rejecting its supposed mythology as this is replaced with anthropological truth.774 De Lubac
traces this tendency to strip the Christian faith of its profound mystery and transcendent
orientation to the influence of Hegel on nineteenth century philosophy. As Hegel holds that
God is not the infinite as set wholly over-and-against the finite (a point that de Lubac
would, in fact, agree with) but rather that the divine spirit becomes absolute spirit precisely
in and through the mediation of finite spirit, the Christian kerygma becomes susceptible to
the ‘overtaking’ proffered by advocates of atheist humanism and thus, as Feuerbach
believes, religion becomes identical with self-consciousness.775
One of the more peculiar expressions of the anthropological transposition of religion to
emerge during the nineteenth century is found within the work of Auguste Comte (1798-
1857), whose thought was of immense influence in France at the turn of the century to the
770 For de Lubac, this humanism is unrecognisable from the Christian vision of humanity as anchored in the
love of God and orientated to the supernatural, which he advances. 771 DAH, 65. Here De Lubac adopts the phrase coined by the Russian Christian philosopher, Nikolai
Berdyaev. De Lubac makes the same point in The Discovery of God, where he writes ‘Man without God is
dehumanzied.’ DG, 193. 772 De Lubac writes, 'contemporary atheism considers itself capble of absorbing into itself the Christian
substance and of transforming the believer... into an atheist.' Henri De Lubac, Athéisme et sens de l'homme:
une double requête de Gaudium et spes (Éditions du Cerf, Vol. 67, 1968), 24. 773 DAH, 422. 774 De Lubac, Athéisme et sens de l'homme: une double requête de Gaudium et spes, 29; see also Hillebert,
"The Death of God and the Dissolution of Humanity," 679. 775 Hillebert, "The Death of God and the Dissolution of Humanity," 680.
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extent that de Lubac refers to it as ‘like the air one breathes.’776 De Lubac allocates an
extended portion of The Drama of Atheist Humanism to an exploration of Comte’s work,
showing how the French philosopher seeks to displace Christianity with the positivist
‘religion of Humanity.’777 This amounts to a radical reconstruction of religion based on
Comte’s well-known ‘law of three states.’778 These states describe the transitions through
which humanity has moved from an initial condition characterised by a primitive belief in
God, through a second, metaphysical, state centred on reasoning, and into a third state
marked by the ‘definitive religion’ of positivism. This final state is marked by an
understanding of intellectual, moral and social questions in terms of immanent natural
laws.779 Comte sees human nature as a social whole, a great organism that through its
perfection over time is worthy of our admiration. However, in contrast to the esteem that
Comte has for human sociality, he dismisses Christianity as a form of slavery and a
principle of division that encourages human beings to gaze upwards instead of focusing on
union with each other.780 Comte’s anti-theism seeks to redress this tendency by redirecting
our feelings, our thoughts and our action around Humanity, which is the new ‘Supreme
Being,’ in order to realise truth and coherence in society.781
Following his discussion of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Comte, de Lubac
examines the atheistic sentiments expressed by several of the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s
776 DAH, 135. Significantly, Comte professes a radical agnosticism with respect to the question of God. He
eschewed the term atheist and never applied this label to himself, regarding it as a ‘mere temporary
negativism.’ DAH, 160-61. Rather surprisingly, although he never tired of dismissing the Christian gospel,
de Lubac notes that Comte had a life-long admiration for Thomas à Kempis’ work, The Imitation of Christ.
DAH, 186. 777 This human-centred religion has its own forms of worship, dogma, regime and even a notion of
scientists as ‘high priests.’ DAH, 216-19, 241. 778 This is also known as the ‘Law of three stages.’ Comte describes these as: the theological or fictitious
state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state. DAH, 139. 779 DAH, 172. See also Hillebert, "The Death of God and the Dissolution of Humanity," 236-37. 780 Comte sees all forms of monotheism as blind and at the root of injustice. DAH, 170. 781 Like Feuerbach, Comte regards religion as ‘a vampire that feeds upon the substance of mankind’ and
seeks, as his predecessor had done, to substitute God with humanity. DAH, 39, 171-72.
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novels.782 De Lubac notes that ‘Dostoevsky’s books abound in atheists.’783 These include
Raskolnikov,784 Stavrogin, Kirillov,785 and Ivan Karamazov, all of whom seek, in a
Nietzschean way, to reach a region situated ‘beyond good and evil.’786 De Lubac
recognises that Dostoevsky’s faith was always a troubled one and that he exhibits some
sympathy for his fictional atheists. Nonetheless, in the chapter ‘The Bankruptcy of
Atheism,’ de Lubac charts the destructive qualities exhibited by the ‘man-gods’ he creates.
Like Nietzsche, he saw the divine sun setting on the horizon of Europe. However, unlike
Nietzsche, this was not something to be hailed as a triumph. Dostoevsky believed Europe
would turn to Christ.787 As Makar Ivanovich states in The Adolescent, ‘to live without God
is nothing but torture… Man cannot live without kneeling…’ After exploring the complex
and sometimes tortured nature of the atheistic characters in the novels, de Lubac holds
Dostoevsky to be a prophet, a mystic and a profound Christian. His Orthodox faith,
wracked with doubt as it was at times, was to sustain him all his life and led to his view of
the universe as imbued with symbolic power.
In the final act of The Drama, de Lubac adopts a more polemical tone as he moves from
the narration of atheistic thought into a theological analysis. This shift sees him examine
the impact of atheistic humanism on humanity and on humanity’s relationship with God.
‘It is not true,’ he writes, ‘that man cannot organise the world without God. What is true is
that, without God, he can ultimately only organise it against man.’788 The atrocities
experienced in Europe during the twentieth century were, for de Lubac, the outworking of
the spiritual crisis provoked by the atheistic humanism of the previous century, just as
Nietzsche had predicted when he spoke of himself as a ‘man of impending disaster.’ For
782 For other studies of Dostoevsky’s fiction, which highlight the atheistic qualities of many of its key
characters, see Stephen Bullivant, "A House Divided Against Itself: Dostoevsky and the Psychology of
Unbelief," Literature and Theology 22, no. 1 (2008); Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and
Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). 783 DAH, 309. 784 The principal chararacter in Dostoevsky’s 1866 novel Crime and Punishment. 785 Stavrogin and Kirillov are chacters from Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Demons. 786 DAH, 282. 787 DAH, 333. 788 Through his service within the French armed forces during the First World War and by fleeing the
Gestapo during the Second World War, de Lubac had witnessed first-hand the atrocious consequences of a
world ‘organised against man.’ DAH, 14.
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de Lubac, then, atheist humanism, far from dignifying humanity, leads to the annihilation
of the human person.789 ‘Man without God is dehumanised.’790 For de Lubac, then, atheist
humanism amounts to what Levinas calls ‘an atheism that is not humanist.’791 By liberating
themselves from obedience to God, atheists have also delivered themselves from obedience
to the human subject. The ‘death of God’ is, in fact, a refusal of all foundations. It is an
‘ontological revolt’ whereby the individual is constituted by the very power of this
negation. Eradicating God does not lead to the affirmation of humanity, but rather to the
abyss of uncertainty and the self-destruction of humanity.792
4.3.3 Mysticism and human reason in the context of faith
An important element within de Lubac’s project that is significant in the context of the
relationship between Christians and non-Christians is connected with his mystical
understanding of Christianity. Indeed, mysticism runs as a leitmotif throughout his
theology.793 De Lubac does not, however, restrict his attention to Christian mysticism. He
recognises its place in other world religions, which he grounds in his understanding of
human nature as a limitless openness to God. He even raises the question of whether it may
be possible to speak of an atheistic mysticism, a theme that he explores in the final section
of his work The Drama of Atheist Humanism, ‘Nietzsche as a Mystic.’794 To underline this
point, de Lubac cites Nietzsche: ‘I am a mystic, and I believe in nothing.’795 In his essay
on Nietzsche’s mysticism, which forms the final chapter of The Drama of Atheist
789 ‘If man takes himself as a god, he can, for a time, cherish the illusion that has raised and freed himself.
But it is a fleeting exaltation! In reality, he has merely abased God, and it is not long before he finds that in
doing so he has abased himself.’ DAH, 67-68. 790 DG, 193. 791 Emmanuel Lévinas, Proper Names (London: Athlone, 1996), 127. 792 Hillebert, "The Death of God and the Dissolution of Humanity," 684-87. 793 De Lubac had planned a book-length study of Christian mysticism. He compiled copious notes for this
work and wrote the first part of it. Alas, however, he considered the book was beyond his abilities, and
sadly it was never completed. See Bryan C. Hollon, "Mysticism and Mystical Theology," in T&T Clark
Companion to Henri de Lubac, ed. Jordan Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 307-08; de Lubac, At the
Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that Occasioned his Writings, 113. 794 DAH, 469-509. 795 de Lubac, "Mysticism and Mystery," 42.
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Humanism, de Lubac seeks to unite the Nietzschean concepts of the Overman and the idea
of the Eternal Return, which he understands to be elements of Nietzsche’s exaltation of life
and of his desire to establish ‘a European Buddhism.’796 Rooted in his inclusive
understanding of salvation, de Lubac holds that all people can receive grace from God and
be led on to mystical experiences even if they are outside the visible Church.797 Despite
this affirmation, de Lubac rejects the idea that different forms of religious mysticism can
be conflated such that they a constitute a shared experience among all the world’s religions.
He also, as I have noted, opposes extrinsicism that conceives of God, in nominalist fashion,
as one being among others (albeit of greater power and proportion) and, as a corollary, any
form of theology disconnected from lived experience. These tendencies, de Lubac argues,
are behind the loss of the sense of the sacred in contemporary life and the reason why so
many people are turning away from their Catholic faith.798 For de Lubac, theological
extrinsicism, nominalism in matters of faith, and the suffocating rationalism of theology
lead to the erosion of the mystical sense of the sacred, which needs to be restored through
the participation in the life of the Trinity through union with Jesus Christ in grace.
De Lubac’s interests in mysticism form a backdrop to his understanding of the
relationship between faith, belief and reason, a topic that forms the central theme in his
work The Discovery of God and which is discussed in some detail by David Grumett.
Despite his insistence that the Christian faith is fundamentally mysterious, de Lubac
refuses to oppose reason and faith, private and public belief, or theology and action. The
faith of the Church is, of course, given formal expression in its Creeds. However, for de
Lubac, the act of faith is not provided by credal affirmation, but arises prior to it. For this
reason, the ‘objective language of the Creed must be the manifestation of the existential
language of the act to which it testifies.’799 In other words, the definitions of belief
contained in the Creeds are products of human reason, yet describe a transcendent reality
and, as such, the Creeds cannot be of purely natural origin.800 This is helpful rejoinder to
796 DAH, 489. 797 Voderholzer, Meet Henri de Lubac: His Life and Work, 212. 798 Hollon, "Mysticism and Mystical Theology," 309-12. 799 de Lubac, Christian Faith: An Essay on the Structure of the Apostles' Creed, 318-19. 800 David Grumett, De Lubac: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007), 113.
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the position of many atheists, who dismiss the Creeds as irrelevant and unbelievable. In
relation to Christian belief, de Lubac asserts that belief is not simply knowledge about God,
but knowledge of God in which God actively reveals himself. For this reason, belief is
dependent on God for its specific content as well as its original possibility. The human
affirmation of God is, then, a sign of the illuminating presence and activity of God in
humanity.801 This notion stems from his understanding of nature being graced and his
understanding of a désir naturel, which provides the basis for why an act of faith by the
human person is possible. Thus, the idea of God emerges spontaneously as part of a
reflective process that includes both rational and mystical elements.802 The act of faith, for
de Lubac, is the ‘fundamental attitude which makes one a Christian, the spiritual reality
which lies at the root of all Christian life.’803 At the heart of the Christian’s belief in God
is a position of trust, because it implies a relation between the believer and the object in
whom the believer places their belief. As Augustine urges, ‘that you should believe in him;
not that you should believe things about him.’804
Because human beings are reasoning beings, reason must complement trust in the
Christian’s affirmation of faith, and thus reason, de Lubac argues, can indeed be used to
argue for God’s existence.805 Thus, whilst faith is essentially personal, objective reason,
particularly as it has been used in constructing the classical proofs for God’s existence, has
801 ‘In no way can the soul attain the knowledge of God , unless God himself stoops down to her, in order
to raise her up to himself. For the human spirit would never have the strength to stay the course, so as to
attain some measure of divine light, if God did not draw it to himself – inasmuch as it is possible for the
human spirit to be thus drawn – and illuminate it with his own brightness.’ DG, 134. 802 Grumett, De Lubac: A Guide for the Perplexed, 114-15. 803 de Lubac, Christian Faith: An Essay on the Structure of the Apostles' Creed, 275. 804 de Lubac, Christian Faith: An Essay on the Structure of the Apostles' Creed, 141. Augstine, Homilies on
the Gospel of John 29.6, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 28 vols; Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1961, I.7, 185. 805 De Lubac argues that reason allows access to a level of perfection that is in itself complete. This is
because God’s revelation ‘can be received by us only in a human mode.’ de Lubac, Christian Faith: An
Essay on the Structure of the Apostles' Creed, 322. For this reason, de Lubac defends the notion of a
Christian philosophy. He asserts that Christian belief has impregnated philosophy with the axioms upon
which it is built and that no philosopher, despite what they may think, can escape from dependence on the
Christian tradition. There is, nonetheless, a radical insufficiency in philosophical logic. In the submission
of Christian faith to revelation lies the ‘beyond of philosophy.’ Henri de Lubac, "Retrieving the Tradition:
On Christian Philosophy, Sharon Mollerus & Susan Clements (trans.)," Communio 19, no. 3 (1992): 484,
88.
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a role. In The Discovery of God, de Lubac mounts a trenchant defence of the validity of
such proofs:
All the objections brought against the various proofs of the existence of God are in vain;
criticism can never invalidate them, for it can never get its teeth into the principle common
to them all. On the contrary, that principle emerges more clearly as the elements with
which the proofs are constructed are rearranged. That is because it is not a particular
principle which the mind can either isolate and sift so as to determine its limits, or reject
out of hand: it forms part of the substance of the mind.806
The function of the proofs of God’s existence is essentially to clear away obstacles to a
clearer perception of divine reality: the proofs are ways, and not foundations of a system
of knowledge.807 The idea of God is not, therefore, dependent on the proofs. Rather, the
proofs are dependent on the idea which provides the ‘inspiration, the motive power and the
justification of them all.’808 For de Lubac, it is clear that Christians mean something very
different when they speak of belief in God from atheists when they deny that they believe
in God. Christian faith in the idea of God is, de Lubac argues, present in the mind without
the assistance of concepts or arguments, whereas, for the atheist, the denial of God often
(although not always) stems from rational argumentation based on the lack of evidence.
These aspects of de Lubac’s thought are exceptionally helpful in providing the Church
with resources to speak about the nature and character of Christian faith. They stem from
de Lubac’s conviction that a principle that transcends nature is essential to human life and
which gives human nature its purpose and meaning. The New Atheists, particularly
Richard Dawkins, are quick to dismiss the traditional proofs of God. De Lubac, however,
is insistent that the affirmation of the existence of an Absolute is essential for human
flourishing. In addition to the classical proofs, de Lubac also supports the proof of God’s
existence advanced by Teilhard de Chardin, whose argument is cosmological as the world
806 DG, 62. 807 DG, 73-74, 116. 808 DG, 39. Grumett, De Lubac: A Guide for the Perplexed, 120.
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goes through a process of convergent evolution, the sufficient reason and cause of which
is the action of a unifying being.809
Although de Lubac assembles a strong case for a pre-conceptual foundation to faith, he
does not advocate an inevitable confession of faith and accepts that the option of denial is
a legitimate position to take. This acknowledgement is instructive and needs to be taken
seriously by the Church as it confronts the challenge of unbelief in contemporary society.
Yet, even where there is doubt, there always remains the possibility of faith beyond it.
‘Whenever we say “No,” we imply that on a deeper level there is a “Yes” which provokes
and originates it; rebellion always implies an acquiescence which is both deeper and more
free.’810 These, again, are important and helpful aspects of de Lubac’s project in connection
with the question of faith, which may shape the dialogue between Christians and
unbelievers. I will draw on additional resources within de Lubac’s project that can
contribute to the Church’s engagement with atheism in Chapter 5.
4.4 De Lubac’s soteriology
Although de Lubac is critical of atheistic humanism and seeks to trace both the roots and
consequences of unbelief in relation to developments both inside and outside of the
Church, he, at the same time, espouses a doctrine of salvation that is communal, rather than
individualistic, which lays the foundations for the Second Vatican Council’s
acknowledgement that unbelievers may be saved. This notion is developed in de Lubac’s
first major work, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, which was
published in 1938. The book is profoundly Christocentric, as de Lubac explores the
question of human disunity – both with the supernatural and amongst people – and how
the unity of the human race (again, both with God and with one another) is restored through
Christ: ‘all infidelity to the divine image that man bears in him, every breach with God, is
809 de Lubac, Theology in History, 521. 810 DG, 195.
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at the same time a disruption of human unity.’811 Yet, ‘the redemption being a work of
restoration will appear to us by that very fact as the recovery of lost unity – the recovery
of supernatural unity of man with God, but equally of the unity of men among
themselves.’812 The notion of the rupture and healing of unity between humanity and God,
as well as among people, is a thread that runs throughout Catholicism. The work underlines
the importance of history as the stage for the drama of salvation, unfolds a vision of the
Church as the temporal vehicle by which humans travel to final union, both with God and
with each other, and conceives of salvation as the healing of God’s image (the bearing of
God’s likeness) and the reunification of the natural and the supernatural, and argues for the
orientation of the entire human race toward the beatific vision.813
De Lubac begins the work with a series of charges made by contemporary ‘free-
thinkers’ who accuse the Church of being disinterested in ‘our terrestrial future and in
human fellowship,’ assert that Christians are only interested in their own souls, and that
they are unconcerned about advancing solidarity with those outside the Church.814 In
outlining these objections, de Lubac indicates that he is less interested in responding to
those who resist Christianity on historical, scientific or philosophical grounds than he is in
engaging with those who are repelled by what they perceive as the individualism of
Christianity and the detachment of the Church from the concerns of humanity.815
Individualism, de Lubac argues, is a particularly pernicious modern ill that has afflicted all
areas of society, including the Church, but which may be addressed from a Christian
perspective as the Church reopens herself to the theme of unity that is at the heart of the
teaching of the Fathers. Despite the riches that the Church is able to draw upon through its
patristic sources, de Lubac concludes that, when criticisms of the Church have been
presented, the misunderstandings are sometimes none other than the fault of Christians: ‘if
811 C, 33. 812 C, 35. De Lubac is quoting the 6th century writer, Paschasius Radbertus: Opus imperfectum in
Matthaeum, hom. 33. 813 Benjamin M Durheim, "All the World is Church: The Christian Call in Henri de Lubac," Obsculta 2, no.
1 (2009): 39. 814 C, 13-14. 815 This corresponds to the Type II atheism identified in the typology set out in the opening chapter of this
thesis.
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so many observers, who are not lacking in acumen or in religious spirit, are so grievously
mistaken about the essence of Catholicism, is it not an indication that Catholics should
make an effort to understand it better themselves?’816 This insistent nostra culpa paves the
way for de Lubac to set out in some detail a vision of Catholicism that is communitarian
and which, at its heart, seeks to explore the relationship between the Church and the
ontological unity of humanity. In this way, de Lubac presents a soteriology that
circumscribes the entire human family whether individual persons are inside the Church
or not and regardless of whether they identify as Christian or in some other way. The
central thesis of Catholicism is that the Apostle Paul, Augustine, other patristic sources,
and Aquinas all regard salvation as primarily social, rather than individual and that, as the
Mystical Body of Christ, the Church is the mediator of an all-inclusive salvation that is
offered to every part of creation, including all people. Indeed, for de Lubac, the Church is
a symbol of humanity.
4.4.1 The dignity of the person and the unity of humanity
For de Lubac, the dignity of each human person is rooted in their supernatural finality:
Deus qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti (God, who in a wonderful
manner, created and ennobled human nature).817 For this reason, ‘the unity of the Mystical
Body of Christ, [which is] a supernatural unity, supposes a previous natural unity, the unity
of the human race.’818 This notion is, de Lubac holds, axiomatic for the Fathers, who
conceive of God creating humanity as a whole. For Irenaeus, Origen, Gregory Nazianzen,
Gregory of Nysa, Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus, Hilary, and others, the lost sheep of the
Gospel that the Good Shepherd brings back to the fold is none other than the whole of
human nature; its sorry state so moves the Word of God that he leaves the great flock of
the angels, as it were to their own devices, in order to go to its help. The Fathers designated
816 C, 11. 817 C, 25. 818 C, 25.
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this nature by a series of equivalent expressions, thus demonstrating that it was in their
view a genuine reality.819
The key here for de Lubac is clearly the unity of the human race. ‘The human race is
one. By our fundamental nature and still more in virtue of our common destiny we are
members of the same body.’820 This is the basis of de Lubac’s social ecclesiology whereby
the Church, which is ‘Jesus Christ spread abroad and communicated,’821 ‘brings beings
into existence and gathers them together into one Whole. Humanity is one, organically one
by its divine structure; it is the Church’s mission to reveal to men that pristine unity that
they have lost, to restore and complete it.’822 ‘She summons all men so that as their mother
she may bring them forth to divine life and eternal light.’823 De Lubac is not, of course,
denying the individual side of Christian faith and spirituality. Rather, he is situating it
within the larger life of the Church and the salvation history for which the Church is, by
the grace of God, the bearer.
Stressing the place of history in Christianity,824 de Lubac emphasises the role of Christ’s
redemption, not in effecting a liberation from the world, but a restoration of its original
goodness and the rescuing of the human race from its bondage to sin. In this way, the
process of salvation gives real value to history because ‘if the salvation offered by God is
in fact the salvation of the human race, since this human race lives and develops in time,
any account of this salvation will naturally take a historical form – it will be the history of
the penetration of humanity by Christ.’825 The penetration of history by God is, for de
Lubac, the real meaning of the Incarnation. This notion forms the basis of de Lubac’s
Christian humanism, which is altogether different, and in profound ways opposed to, the
humanism of immanence that seeks to replace God with humanity, which emerged in the
nineteenth century and which led to such catastrophic consequences in the twentieth
819 C. 25-26. 820 C, 222. 821 C, 48. 822 C, 53. 823 C, 65. 824 C, 308. 825 C, 141.
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century. De Lubac’s humanism, drawing on patristic principles,826 holds that the liberation
of the intellect and the renewal of the life of the spirit are closely intertwined. He asserts
that ‘in revealing to us the God who is in the end man, Jesus Christ, the Man-God, reveals
us to ourselves, and without him the ultimate foundation of our being would remain an
enigma to us.’827 As Rowan Williams puts it, ‘we are oriented… towards revelation, to an
irruption of God’s truth that simultaneously fulfils and judges our natural life and
desire…’828
4.4.2 The Church as the means for salvation
De Lubac is clear the Church is the social embodiment of grace, which is a notion that he
bases on the presupposition of the primordial unity of the human race.829 As I have noted,
this conception enables him to envisage salvation as the restored unity of humanity in
Christ,830 the Church being both the means and the end of this restored unity and thus
eschatologically coterminous with redeemed humanity as the Body of Christ. A key theme
in Catholicism is that the Church, as the continuation of Israel, is a community – in all of
its facets – that is on its way through history to the shared salvation promised by God.831
This takes us to the heart of his soteriology, which is grounded in the principle that
anthropology is closely interwoven with Christology. In other words, what it is to be human
is inseparable from union with Christ in the whole Christ as mediated by the Church.832
Referring to the Fathers, he asserts: ‘For them, in fact, in a certain sense, the Church was
826 C, 321. 827 de Lubac, "The Total Meaning of Man and the World," 626-27. Emphasis added. 828 Rowan Williams, "Foreword: A Paradoxical Humanism," in T&T Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac,
ed. Jordan Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), xviii. 829 Foreshadowing the thought of Edward Schillebeeckx, De Lubac’s ecclesiology is highly sacramental:
‘If Christ is the sacrament of God, the church is for us the sacrament of Christ; she represents him, in the
full and ancient meaning of the term, she really makes him present.’ C, 29. 830 C, 35. 831 Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie - New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II,
96. 832 Susan K. Wood, Spiritual Exegesis and the Church in the Theology of Henri de Lubac (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1998), 129-30.
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nothing else than the human race itself, in all the phases of its history, in so far as it was to
lead to Christ and be quickened by his Spirit.’833
This soteriology is worked out in what is perhaps the most important chapter of
Catholicism, ‘Salvation Through the Church.’ This begins with a rejection of the statement
attributed to Saint Cyran that ‘Not one single drop of graces falls on the pagans.’834 De
Lubac believes that all people receive some sense of divine revelation. And, for de Lubac,
when good works and right intention are encountered in those outside the Church this
should be a cause for celebration. ‘Outside Christianity humanity can doubtless be raised
in an exceptional manner to certain spiritual heights, and it is our duty – one that is perhaps
too often neglected – to explore these heights that we may give praise to the God of mercies
for them: Christian pity for unbelievers, which is never the fruit of scorn, can sometimes
be born of admiration.’835 Humanity, in de Lubac’s view, ‘is made up of persons who have
all the same one eternal destiny, in whatever category or century their birth has placed
them… in spite of great differences of understanding and of function, all members of the
human race enjoy the same essential equality before God.’836 With respect to the ultimate
destiny of unbelievers, de Lubac goes on to state that God, ‘desiring that all men should be
saved, but not allowing in practice that all should be visibly in the Church, wills
nevertheless that all those who answer his call should in the last resort be saved through
his Church: Sola Ecclesia gratia qua redimur (It is only by the grace of the Church that we
are redeemed).’ Thus, ‘revelation and redemption are bound together, and the Church is
their only Tabernacle.’837 This is a fascinating element in de Lubac’s theology that has
immense significance for the Church’s understanding of itself in relation to the culture of
atheism and unbelief in the modern world.
833 C, 191. 834 C, 217. 835 C, 223. 836 C. 232-33. 837 C, 226.
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Based on these patristic principles, de Lubac asserts that ‘unbelievers’ are, ‘in the design
of Providence, indispensable for building the Body of Christ’ and, for that reason, ‘they
must in their own way profit from their vital connection with this same Body.’838
By extension with the dogma of the communion of the saints, it seems right to think that
though they themselves are not in the normal way of salvation, they will be able
nevertheless to obtain this salvation by virtue of those mysterious bonds which unite them
to the faithful. In short, they can be saved because they are an integral part of that
humanity which is saved.839
This is an important statement, which articulates the clear direction of de Lubac’s
capacious, comprehensive and social understanding of both salvation and the Church. It
signals a key contribution in his project to the question of the status of unbelievers within
the divine economy and, as we shall see in a fuller discussion of the matter in the final
chapter of this thesis, provides the starting point for a constructive, generous and fruitful
dialogue between Christians and unbelievers.
In developing his thesis of universal salvation, de Lubac must inevitably revisit the
ancient formula extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.840 De Lubac does not deny the validity of the
statement. However, as other Catholic theologians had done in the mid-twentieth century,
he seeks to move beyond an interpretation of it based on who is saved and posit, instead, a
notion of how all of humanity is saved. Affirming that the Church is God’s willed vehicle
for salvation within the matrix of human history, de Lubac wishes to preserve what he
regards as the truth of the formula without interpreting it in a narrow, triumphalist or
ultimately uncharitable way.841
The Church is not a smug society ringed about in unapproachable superiority; not a fortress
bristling with dogmatic guns to repel the hordes of infidels against whom She wages a
perpetual warfare. No! Her doors are open to all and sundry, to sinners even, though not to
838 C, 233. 839 C, 233, emphasis added. 840 This was first expressed by Cyprian of Carthage in the third century. 841 Royal, A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, 156.
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sin. Her boundaries extend as far as the furthermost limits of the universe, for She is
Universal and Divine.842
Thus, de Lubac affirms, in line with Augustine,843 other Fathers and Aquinas, that ‘the
grace of Christ is of universal application, and that no soul of good will lacks the concrete
means of salvation, in the fullest sense of the world.’844 De Lubac is adamant that the
formula does not mean that no one is ever saved if they do not belong exteriorly to the
Church.845 Rather, he interprets the statement to mean that ‘it is by the Church and by the
Church alone that you will be saved.’ This is because ‘it is through the Church that the
salvation will come, that is already coming to mankind.’846 ‘Those who do not know the
Church are saved by her…847 This inclusive conception of salvation extends, in de Lubac’s
thought, not just to those living outside the Church today but to people who were born
before the Incarnation. It is evident, therefore, that his soteriology is rigorously universalist
and incorporates the whole human family.
De Lubac’s arguments in Catholicism also find expression in several of his other articles
and works. Thus, in The Discovery of God, de Lubac holds that God seeks out all people,
whether or not they are conscious of this and regardless of the extent of their faith in God.
‘Sometimes we think we are looking for God. But it is always God who is looking for us,
and he often allows himself to be found by those who are not looking for him.’848 De
Lubac’s soteriology, which is centred on the salvation of the entire human family,
represents a significant element in his project and was to lay the groundwork for the
optimistic position regarding the salvation of atheists, which finds expression in three of
the key documents to emerge from the Second Vatican Council, Lumen gentium, Gaudium
842 Jordan Pearson, "Salvation through the Church," Blackfriars 20, no. 234 (1939): 689. 843 De Lubac notes that, for Augustine, divine mercy was always at work among all people (De ordine, lib.
2, c. 10, n. 29) and that even the pagans had their “hidden saints” and their prophets (Contra Faustum, lib.
19, c. 2) C, 219. 844 C, 219. 845 C, 234. 846 C, 236. 847 C, 237. 848 DG, 168.
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et spes and Nostra aetate.849 Whether de Lubac was a thorough-going universalist with
respect to human salvation is not altogether clear. It may be that his thought is more in line
with the mainstream of twentieth-century Catholic thought as this is encountered in
Rahner, Ratzinger, and Congar, as well as other thinkers.
Finally, it should be noted that De Lubac’s significant contribution to a renewed
Catholic understanding of salvation must be set alongside other important theological and
social endeavours that took place within the Catholic Church during the decades before the
Council that are congruent with de Lubac’s thought, and which helped to lay the foundation
for the Council’s focus on the engagement of the Catholic Church with contemporary
culture. These include the concord that was to develop between the Catholic Church and
the French Communist Party850 as well as the priest-worker initiative, which was started
by Jacques Loew in the Marseilles docks in 1941, and which saw Catholic priests taking
up positions in factories within the major industrial centres in France.
4.5 Conclusion
In this chapter I have shown that de Lubac was a highly innovative and significant
theologian who made critical contributions to Catholic theology in connection with a
number of important themes: the relationship between nature and grace, the question of
atheism, the communal nature of salvation, the role of the Church as the Mystical Body of
Christ in the world and the correspondence between the orders of creation and redemption.
In his works, particularly in his key text, Surnaturel, de Lubac sought to restore contact
849 For an exploration of de Lubac’s influence on and involvement in the Second Vatican Council, see
Riches, "Henri de Lubac and the Second Vatican Council." 850 La main tendue (outstretched hand) is the term used to describe the formal position of openness and
dialogue between Catholicism and Communism.
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between Catholic theology and contemporary thought851 by developing a critique of
neoscholasticism, which, in his opinion, swallows up the mystery of faith.852
As with any theologian, de Lubac is not without his critics. It has been pointed out that
de Lubac’s work is, at times, marked by a lack of systematic rigour or technical precision
and that it contains relatively few references to biblical scholarship.853 This may reflect the
fact that he did not receive specialised formation in systematic or historical theology and
never completed a doctoral thesis. Another arena of criticism is centred on de Lubac’s
reading of the relationship between nature and grace. The debate between de Lubac and
his followers on the one hand, and neoscholastic thinkers on the other, was one of the most
complex, profound and intriguing issues of twentieth-century theology, and the arguments
have persisted well into the present century. In recent years, the controversy provoked by
Surnaturel has shown little sign of dissipating, and neoscholasticism has reasserted its
position in conservative Catholic theology.
Notwithstanding some shortcoming in de Lubac’s work and the controversy he
provoked through his attacks on neoscholasticism, there are many valuable elements of his
project that position him as an important thinker in the Christian response to atheism.
Indeed, his commitment to engage theologically with contemporary culture, particularly
the phenomena of atheism and unbelief, has been hugely influential on other authors who
have sought to pursue similar lines of enquiry, especially those who identify as part of the
Radical Orthodoxy movement.854 Against a backdrop of a combination of theological
rationalism, which relegates mystery to an ever more circumscribed and less credible area,
and the denial of God in contemporary culture, de Lubac develops a theological position
851 ASC, 34. 852 Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie - New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II,
98. 853 Randall S. Rosenberg, The Givenness of Desire: Concrete Subjectivity and the Natural Desire to See
God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 35. 854 Simon Oliver, "Henri de Lubac and Radical Orthodoxy," in T&T Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac,
ed. Jordan Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical
Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 158-65, 72, 75, 90, 254-55, 59; James K. A.
Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology (Milton Keynes: Paternoster
Press, 2004), 12, 18, 35, 43, 46, 253 n.13.
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that sees God as infinite mystery and one by whose grace the recreation of human existence
is possible.855 His interrogation of atheist humanism identifies the destructive and anti-
human orientation of this position, although, as we have seen, particularly in his study of
Proudhon, de Lubac also recognises the validity of some atheist criticism of Christianity.
Perhaps of greatest importance, however, is de Lubac’s communion ecclesiology, which
is centred on a radically inclusive and comprehensive Catholic ecclesial vision. This
provides a starting point for dialogue between Christianity and atheism that offers great
potential. I will explore this more fully in the final chapter of this thesis.
855 See Francesco Bertoldi, "The Religious Sense in Henri de Lubac," Communio 16, Spring (1989): 6-8.
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Chapter 5:
Christianity and atheism in
dialogue
I have sought in this thesis to underline the importance of developing a constructive
dialogue between atheism Christianity and set out the groundwork that may pave the way
for Christians and atheists to relate to each other in a nuanced and meaningful way. I have
also highlighted the resources, particularly as I have encountered these in the thought of
Jüngel, Hart, and de Lubac, that I believe the Church can draw upon as it seeks to lay the
foundations for a robust and yet sympathetic dialogue with atheists and unbelievers that
goes beyond presumptions and prejudices. I have stressed the complexity of atheistic
arguments and the different ways in which these are expressed by outlining a four-fold
typology of atheism. I have also underlined the intimate connection between belief and
unbelief, the recognition of which is, I believe, a key element in bringing Christians and
atheists into conversation with each other. The overcoming of the binary distinction
between atheism and Christianity is, I argue, a vital element in the development of fruitful
exchange between those who do and do not believe in God as it can enable both groups to
learn from one another and to see how closely entangled belief and unbelief actually are.
I believe that atheism, in its many manifestations throughout history and in
contemporary societies, presents the Church with a great moment of clarification, offering
a perspective from which Christians can learn much about how they are perceived from
the outside, and that it offers to Christian theology, as each of the theologians examined in
this thesis affirm, a resource for its renewal. There is no doubt that atheism has reshaped
216
the circumstances in which Christianity now operates by radically changing the conditions
for belief within the West.856
In this final chapter I set out my own perspectives on both the challenges of and
opportunities for dialogue and engagement between Christianity and atheism. It is my view
that atheist-Christian dialogue is both desirable and important, and that there are many
occasions that make not only dialogue, but other forms of partnership and cooperation,
possible. I am, of course, aware that not all atheists or Christians will wish to enter into
dialogue. However, when respectful, charitable, and meaningful conversations between
atheists and Christians take place, the outcomes can be both constructive and fruitful, for
these encounters provide both believers and unbelievers with the opportunity to better
understand each other and, furthermore, to learn from each other. This mutual learning is,
I believe, one of the principal benefits of atheist-Christian dialogue.
In the remainder of this final chapter I will highlight the importance and desirability of
developing a constructive dialogue between atheism and Christianity, highlight the
resources for dialogue that are provided by my three dialogue partners, Eberhard Jüngel,
David Bentley Hart, and Henri de Lubac, offer some perspectives on how engagement by
Christians with each of the categories of atheism within the typology that I offered in
Chapter 1 may be advanced, outline several principles that need to characterise dialogue
between Christianity and atheism, examine the role and place of the Church’s ministry in
an age of unbelief (including patient listening, partnership and collaboration), and conclude
with some remarks on the way in which atheism and Christianity can engage positively
with each other in our religiously complex society.
856 Mohler, Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheists, 106-07.
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5.1 Towards a constructive dialogue between
atheism and Christianity
There is little doubt that atheism will present a continuing challenge to Christianity in the
twenty-first century, and that it will have an increasingly public nature. It is certainly true
that atheism has become a far more legitimate cultural option than was the case in previous
generations. Atheism as a modern phenomenon is not going to go away. In the light of this
reality, the Church will need to frame its thinking in response to the reality of contemporary
atheism and unbelief.857 The same applies to thoughtful Christians for they will have to
confront the reality of atheism and unbelief in contemporary society, not in a hostile way
but in a manner that is respectful, charitable, and open to learning from those who reject
the existence of God. Christians will need to recognise that churchgoing is no longer a
normal social activity, that churches, church buildings, and the culture that they are
associated with have become alien to many, and that people searching for spiritual reality
will tend to look beyond churches in order to find it.858 Personally, I know many people
who find churches dreary and uninviting, encounter in the Christian liturgy something that
is incomprehensible and off-putting, experience sermons as boring, and have major
objections to the moral stance adopted by church communities on certain issues in society,
particularly the validity of same-sex relationships.859
I am conscious that the challenge of the New Atheist movement, which although less
vociferous than in it was in the first decade of the current century, continues to be felt and,
as numerous surveys have confirmed, atheism and non-religion have become increasingly
popular labels for people in Western societies to adopt with respect to their beliefs. I am
also aware that although it was once impossible not to believe and only later possible not
to believe, for millions of people living in the West today, the default position is that it is
impossible to believe in God. This is a position that I consider needs to be accepted. Where
857 Mohler, Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheists, 87-88. 858 Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom : Church and Mission in a Strange New World (London: SCM Press,
2018), 169. 859 See Jessica Rose, Church on Trial (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009), 63-83.
218
belief does persist, it is often only in a vaguely theistic form of ‘spirituality’ where people
believe in belief rather than in God.860 Simon Critchley refers to the seemingly
contradictory presence of beliefs amongst those who retain an atheistic identity as the faith
of the faithless, or the belief of unbelievers. Drawing on experiences of Oscar Wilde, who
used the incipit of Psalm 130, De Profundis (‘From the depths I cry to thee, O Lord’), as
the title for a complex letter that he wrote to his inconstant lover, Lord Alfred Douglas,
Critchley notes that even agnostics and atheists have an experience of faith in a way that
is not so dissimilar to theists. ‘Those who cannot believe,’ he asserts, ‘still require religious
truth and a framework of ritual in which they can believe.’ Unbelievers do, then, require
an experience of belief, although this cannot be a traditional conception of religion defined
by an experience of a postulate of ‘transcendent fullness, namely God.’861
5.2 Resources for dialogue in the theology of
Jüngel, Hart and de Lubac
In this section I will return to the contributions that the key thinkers who I have explored
in this thesis, Eberhard Jüngel, David Bentley Hart, and Henri de Lubac, have made to the
theological analysis of atheism. My focus will be on the resources that each theologian
offers to the Church as it enters into dialogue with atheists. As I noted in the Introduction,
and as will have become clear in the chapters dedicated to the thought of each theologian,
the circumstances and types of unbelief that prompted each of these interlocutors to engage
with atheism were different and, for this reason, they each focus on distinctive aspects of
the atheistic critique. Consequently, I argue that the resources that they provide for the
Church as it works to develop a constructive relationship with atheists and atheism will be
unique to each thinker.
860 Mohler, Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheists, 106-07. 861 Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2014),
1-7.
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5.2.1 Eberhard Jüngel’s perspectives on atheism
As I noted in Chapter 2, Jüngel’s primary concern is with what he calls the ‘unthinkability’
of God, a problem that he believes underpins equally both atheism and contemporary
theology.
Both the atheism and the theology of the modern day stand equally overshadowed by the
dark clouds of the unthinkability of God. Both faith and unbelief seem to regard these
shadows as their destiny. At the end of the history of metaphysics, God appears to have
become unthinkable.862
These words provide the starting point for Jüngel’s magnum opus, God as the Mystery of
the World.
In Chapter 2, I examined Jüngel’s genealogy of atheism, which is centred on the notions
of the worldly necessity of God and of the derivative notion of the death of God declared
by Nietzsche. There is, I argue, much that might be learnt from Jüngel’s engagement with
atheism as he seeks to understand the phenomenon of unbelief, identify its emergence as a
consequence of moves made within Christian theology, and respond to it in a manner that
presents a renewed theological vision which is founded on God’s engagement with human
experience, worldly existence and death. I shall proceed by discussing a number of strands
in Jüngel’s theology of atheism that may be helpful for the Church as it seeks to make
sense of modern atheism.
Firstly, it is clear from his writing that Jüngel is committed to taking atheism seriously
on its own terms and that he seeks to treat atheists with a high level of respect. ‘Anyone
who has to talk about the overcoming of godlessness by God [must] take the atheist
seriously as a particularly mature form of homo humanus.’863 This same point is expressed
in bold terms in a key article by Jüngel where he notes the need to ‘understand atheism
862 GMW, vii. 863 Cited in Jürgen Moltmann, "Eberhard Jüngel," in How I have Changed : Reflections on Thirty Years of
Theology (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1997), 9.
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better than it understands itself’ and to unfold the ‘moment of truth within atheism.’864 For
Jüngel, atheism functions as a genuine and legitimate alternative to Christianity in the
modern world.865 This, I believe, is a commendable aspect of Jüngel’s thought and one hat
the Church needs to be heedful of as it operates within an increasingly secular society
within which a growing number of people reject the existence of God and identify as
unbelievers. Centred on the false notion of God’s necessity, God as the Mystery of the
World contains Jüngel’s sustained attempt to critique the binary of atheism and theism,
which has been a central concept within my thesis. The metaphysical deity, in its
abstraction, will always be nothing more than a conceptual idol.866 He argues that as
modernity ran its course God became nothing more than our own self-consciousness,
whether this was the ‘I think’ of Descartes, ‘I work’ of Marx, or Nietzsche’s ‘I will’, all of
which are expressions of Fichte’s self-positing ego and versions of modernity’s sovereign
self.867
Secondly, and following on from the seriousness with which Jüngel attends to modern
atheism, I consider that his project, particularly in God as the Mystery of the World, can be
seen as a rigorously worked out theological attempt to offer a critique of the sub-Christian
aspects of ‘theism’ and to point to a genuinely Christian concept of God that is ‘beyond
theism and atheism.’ Jüngel is therefore an example of a thinker who is sensitive to the
intimate connections between belief and unbelief. In this sense, as will be discussed below,
Jüngel has much in common with de Lubac. For both theologians believe, albeit for
different reasons, that modern atheism was germinated in the soil of Christian theology.
As Webster notes about Jüngel’s observations, ‘atheism is as much a child of theology’s
theistic self-alienation as of philosophical unbelief.’868 God as the Mystery of the World is
864 Eberhard Jüngel, "Towards the Heart of the Matter," The Christian Century (1991): 230. The same
point is made in GMW: ‘Theology must take atheism more seriously than it does itself by preventing it
from becoming a substitute religion.’ GMW, 97. 865 Derek Nelson, "The Indicative of Grace & The Imperative of Freedom: An Invitation to the Theology of
Eberhard Jüngel," Dialog: A Journal of Theology 44, no. 2 (2005): 169-70. 866 Paul R. Hinlicky, Beloved Community: Critical Dogmatics after Christendom (Grand Rapids, Michigan:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), 127-28. 867 Hinlicky, Beloved Community: Critical Dogmatics after Christendom, 131. 868 Webster, "Theologies of Retrieval," 587.
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fundamentally a work of dogmatic theology and cannot be understood an apologetic text
that is aimed at a non-Christian readership.869 Jüngel asserts that ‘atheism as the negation
of theism is a critical moment of Christian theology which should be brought to bear in the
concept of God.’870 In developing this argument, Jüngel is placing his work within the
parameters set out by Simon Weil, who remarked that ‘there are two atheism, or which one
is a purification of faith.’871 Even though, of course, there are many more species of
atheism than two, Weil’s statement signals the prophetic quality that atheism may have in
challenging illusions of religious belief and behaviour and, for this reason, it may be
cathartic. Atheism is then, for Jüngel, a catalyst for theology to rethink the doctrine of God.
Thus, Jüngel attempts to ‘develop a conceptuality of the divine being within the context of
modern intellectual and cultural atheism, a context shaped by the collapse of “metaphysical
theism” in both its philosophical and theological forms.’872
The third key strand in Jüngel’s response to atheism is his insistence that God can only
be apprehended as the one who comes into the world in his humanity. I see this as the
central theme in his thought. Jüngel’s theistic reconstruction can only be understood
therefore when the fundamental connection between his trinitarian doctrine and the notion
of God’s suffering and death is grasped. Jüngel’s trinitarian interpretation of God is as a
God who comes to humanity in language and in history as the Crucified One and who, as
a result, cannot be sought through metaphysical or ontological philosophical frameworks.
These only serve to make God unthinkable. ‘The atheism born out of modern philosophy
is a child of resignation.’873 To think of God’s essence and existence as united in God’s
worldly presence requires, Jüngel argues, to confront God’s union with perishability.
Theology must be ‘prepared to destroy the understanding of God as superior to us (supra
869 ‘It is not a concern of Christian talk about God to present an apology (defense) over against atheism.’
GMW, 253 n.15. 870 GMW, 97. 871 Weil, Gravity and Grace, 103. 872 DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 3. 873 GMW, 185.
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nos) in order to think God in the way that he has revealed himself in his identity with the
man Jesus’874
For the many atheists who find the notion of an abstract and detached God
inconceivable, I believe that Jüngel’s project offers a focal point for thinking about God as
present in the world through God’s union with Jesus and, most importantly, in Jesus’
suffering and death. In this way, I suggest that Jüngel actually sides with the atheist in his
or her rejection of abstract philosophical notions of divinity, accepting their critique as he
seeks to characterise God in human terms as one who enters into the predicament of our
perishability. Furthermore, in asserting that ‘the dimension of historical factuality can be
regarded as the place of the thinkability of God… when the character of the temporality of
historical reality is taken seriously,’875 Jüngel provides a valuable starting point for
Christian theology to respond to those atheistic thinkers, such as Gilles Deleuze, who assert
that being is laid out in a ‘plane of immanence,’ or ‘plane of Nature.’ The notion that God
is revealed in hiddenness, in the cross of Christ and in human language through the
‘analogy of advent,’ represents, I argue, a vision of God’s presence as embedded in the
immanent sphere of historical reality. Jüngel provides a severely negative evaluation of the
theistic tradition, rejecting the notion that the God can be thought about as an essence that
is separate from concrete historical reality.876 By stressing the centrality of language,
humanity and history as the loci in which God is to be encountered, Jüngel provides a
helpful starting point for dialogue with those philosophical and cultural perspectives that
seek to erase notions of transcendence and which assert that mundane existence is the only
dimension of reality.
In summary, the atheistic question of where God is can only be addressed, according to
Jüngel, in a Christological manner. Drawing on both Hegel and Bonhoeffer, Jüngel locates
God in the death of Jesus and asserts that the concept of the ‘death of God’ is the only way
in which the question of where God is can be answered. From Bonhoeffer’s perspective,
874 GMW, 187. 875 GMW, 189. 876 Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology, 80.
223
based on his notion of ‘the church for others,’ the task of Christians engaging with
unbelievers in our pluralistic world is essential. This is because dialogue is appropriate for
a theology of the cross that seeks to eschew triumphalism’s desire to control and claim
absolute knowledge. Christians are ‘free in the promise of the gospel to participate in the
give and take quest for the discovery of shared values that can guide action for the common
good.’877 This is certainly a position that Jüngel agrees with.
The whole thrust of God as the Mystery of the World is Jüngel’s attempt to work this
notion out theologically and, in so doing, to confront cultural and intellectual atheism, the
modern expressions of the death of God, with its own origins in the Christian faith.878
Jüngel’s judgement is that atheism can only be rejected when theism is overcome,879 for it
is the belief in the necessity of God, metaphysically conceived, that is the at the root of
contemporary atheism.880 Jüngel’s criticism of certain strands of Christian theology which
have been founded on a metaphysical understanding of God’s essence is insightful and
important, and may challenge Christian theology to place a greater focus on the this-
worldly sphere of revelation and the ongoing presence of God today. Theology must leave
behind both the unchristian theism and atheism and appeal to the specific content of the
Christian affirmation of God’s self-identification with the Crucified One, through which
the depth of God’s humanity is laid bare.
Jüngel, as I highlighted in Chapter 2, takes atheism very seriously, he locates unbelief
in notions of an abstract and philosophically-conceived ‘metaphysical’ deity, and he
regards atheism as a valuable source from which Christianity can learn a great deal. His
focus on God’s presence in the world in the Crucified One, as God enters the human
experience of perishability and death, is an important one and his work, particularly within
God as the Mystery of the World, provides the Church with significant resources for
entering into a constructive dialogue with atheism. For this reason, within the Protestant
tradition, Jüngel may represent the key thinker for the Church to draw upon as it seeks to
877 Childs, "Lutheran Theology and Dialogical Engagement in Post-Christian Society," 149. 878 DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God, 9. 879 GMW, 43. 880 Zimany, Vehicle for God, 89.
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engage with atheism and unbelief. Whilst supporting much of Jüngel’s analysis of
atheism’s origins in metaphysical conceptions of God, I should also add that Jüngel’s
thought by itself is not sufficient to address all of the objections raised by atheists. Jüngel,
I have argued, restricts his analysis to Type I and Type II categories of atheism in my
typology and does not engage at all with Type III or Type IV expressions of atheism. For
this reason, in entering into a constructive dialogue with atheism, I suggest that the Church
needs to also draw on the projects of David Bentley Hart and Henri de Lubac, I shall
examine the thought of these thinkers in the context of atheism and unbelief in the next
two sections.
5.2.2 David Bentley Hart’s contribution to atheist-Christian
dialogue
The second interlocutor I examined in this thesis, David Bentley Hart, has, as I discussed
in Chapter 3, much to say about atheism, both as he encounters this in Continental
philosophy in the wake of Nietzsche, and in the arguments of several members of the New
Atheist movement. In his key works, The Beauty of the Infinite, Atheist Delusions, and The
Experience of God, as well as in several journal articles, Hart highlights a series of
shortcomings and misunderstandings in the work of philosophers and cultural
commentators who align themselves with an atheistic position. His project is a fascinating
one and it contains many resources, which will be identified later on in this section, for the
Church to draw upon as it engages in the task of developing a constructive dialogue with
atheism.
In addition to a profound misconception of the mystery of God, Hart argues that
contemporary atheists, particularly those aligning themselves with the New Atheist
movement, misunderstand the ontological contingency of all creatures upon God, as they
frequently state that existence is a purely natural phenomenon. Naturalism, Hart argues, is
a false philosophical precept and is radically insufficient in its explanatory range.881
881 EG, 18.
225
Despite these arguments, Hart, in common with Jüngel and de Lubac, acknowledges that
atheism is not necessarily untenable and accepts that it may be perfectly rational for
someone to reject the notion of a transcendent source for existence in a context where no
sense of God or of any transcendent reality is present to them.882
Hart also shares the views of both Jüngel and de Lubac in connection with the role of
the Church and Christian thought in generating conceptions of God that have inadvertently
promoted atheism, and in so doing further demonstrates the entanglement of belief and
unbelief. He refers, for example, to the emergence of the understanding of reality in terms
of a purely mechanical cosmos, which became a kind of ontology at the beginning of the
Modern era. Although the reasons for the shift to this perspective from the older theocentric
view of reality (when the universe was regarded as a kind of theophany that reflects the
divine light of creation) can be traced through scientific, social and ideological
developments, Hart notes that theology also contributed to the tendency for people in the
West to acquire the habit of seeing the universe as subject to investigation and
understanding solely in accordance with a mechanistic paradigm. According to this
worldview, God is reimagined as a divine designer and maker, the ‘god of the machine,’
rather than the transcendent ground of all reality.883
The first area where Hart makes an important contribution to atheist-Christian dialogue
is in connection with the doctrine of God. Hart is attentive to the misunderstandings that
are widespread in modern atheistic rhetoric concerning the nature of God and recognises
that the word ‘God’ is used in entirely different ways by Christians (together with those of
other faiths) and atheists.884 In other words, two incommensurable worlds collide when
theists and atheists speak about God. Atheists, Hart argues, have by and large come to
understand God not as the truly transcendent source and end of all contingent reality, who
creates through ‘donating’ being to a natural order that is complete in itself, but only as a
882 EG, 19. 883 EG, 57-58. 884 As Keith Jones, a former Dean of York, puts it: ‘Atheists frequently express their astonishment that
anyone with any intelligence should believe in God. The difficulty I find with them is that the God in
whom they disbelieve is so different from the God in whom I believe.’ Keith Jones, Adam's Dream:
Human Longings and the Love of God (London: Mowbray, 2007), 1.
226
kind of supreme mechanical cause located somewhere within the continuum of nature.885
As McGrath notes in commenting on Dawkins’ conception of God in The God Delusion,
‘genuine believers will not even recognise their beliefs in his presentation.’886 For Hart,
drawing on the patristic tradition and in agreement with classical Christian and other
theistic thought, God is utterly and essentially transcendent of the world. This
understanding of God’s nature is entirely different from the pervasive error in many
contemporary arguments about belief in God, Hart argues, especially, but not exclusively,
on the atheist side, which is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large
object. God, by contrast, is not in any sense an object. Rather, Hart asserts, God is the
infinite actuality that makes existence possible and who has created a world that is open to
investigation and encounter, either through acts of logical deduction and induction and
conjecture, or by contemplative or sacramental or spiritual experiences. Evidence for God,
then, saturates every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason,
every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.887
Another important facet of Hart’s conception of God pertains to God’s immutability
and freedom from the created order. In relation to this doctrine, Hart stands in opposition
to the position held by Jüngel, who stresses the suffering of God through God’s experience
of perishability. Hart recognises the shift away from affirmation of divine apatheia in
much, particularly (although not exclusively) Lutheran, contemporary theology. However,
Hart believes that it is a non-negotiable feature of any genuinely Christian doctrine of God
because, he argues, only an impassible God can truly be God, the source and ground of all
beings rather than merely one supreme being among other finite beings. For Hart, divine
apatheia is pure activity, pure self-giving, charity, pure agape.888 Hart recognises that
reconciling the temporal event of God in our midst with God’s event to himself in his
eternity presents a challenge, and notes the current in modern theology, particularly in the
885 EG, 28. 886 Alister E. McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion : Atheist Fundamentalism
and the Denial of the Divine (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 13. 887 EG, 33-34. 888 Brent A.R. Hege, "The Suffering of God? The Divine Love and the Problem of Suffering in Classical
and Process-Relational Theisms" (paper presented at the 2010 John Templeton Award for Theological
Promise Laureates Colloquium, 2010), 8.
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case of those theologians who have been influenced by Hegel (such as Moltmann, Jüngel,
and Jenson), that desires a God who suffers, not simply with us and in our nature, but in
his own nature as well.889 Hart responds to this challenge by stressing the doctrine of divine
apatheia by which, he argues, God does not suffer in his essence, despite the fact that Jesus,
as a human person, did quite clearly experience suffering.
One of the key challenges for the Church in addressing the unbelief of those who assert
that the world holds no evidence for God concerns the question of how divinity may be
encountered within human experience. This is another area where Hart has much to offer
in the context of the dialogue between Christianity and atheism. For in Hart’s aesthetical
theology, which is most fully worked out in The Beauty of the Infinite, a sustained argument
is developed that centres on the manifestation of God in the beauty of creation. ‘Beauty,’
Hart notes, is a term that elides precise definition and since the eighteenth-century
distinction between beauty and the sublime, much modern and postmodern philosophy has
focused on the latter term, and beauty has, correspondingly, been corroded of its value,
regarded as mere negation or a spasm of illusory calm in the midst of being’s sublimity.890
Hart, however, is critical of this move and argues that beauty is a category that is
indispensable to Christian thought. Indeed, all that theology says of the triune life of God,
the gratuity of creation, the Incarnation itself, and the salvation of the world, both makes
room for and depends upon a thought and narrative of the beautiful.891 Hart’s
understanding of beauty as an experience that mediates God’s infinite and unseen presence
in creation is of great importance in the context of atheist-Christian dialogue. This is
because in the conversation that the Church can attempt to open up with unbelievers,
reference to beauty, along with the other transcendentals, goodness and truth, avoids the
need to present a case for the Christian faith that is based on metaphysical propositions or
upon historical evidence, both of which are frequently dismissed as unintelligible by
atheists. Beauty is a concept that all people can relate to and will have some experience of.
Hart argues that such experiences have a sacramental quality in that they bring us to a
889 TBI, 159. 890 TBI, 15. 891 TBI, 16.
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mystical encounter with the source of all beauty, which is God. This is clearly expressed
and holds the potential to provide a valuable starting point for dialogue between Christians
and atheists.
Hart’s affirmation of universal salvation and his associated rejection of the notion that
a loving and merciful God would consign individuals to the eternal torment of hell,
although open to the criticism that he is sacrificing an important dimension of orthodox
Christian belief, was outlined in Chapter 3. This aspect of Hart’s theology, which was
explored in some detail in his most recent work, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell,
and Universal Salvation, strongly echoes the position of Henri de Lubac’s social and
communitarian understanding of salvation, which I examined in Chapter 4 and which I will
discuss again in the next section. Both thinkers draw their inspiration from the Church
Fathers, who were generally in agreement that God’s salvation in Christ is offered to the
whole of creation and that all people will be enfolded in God’s love and find eternal peace
in heaven. Hart is surely correct in identifying the doctrine of eternal perdition and the
conception of hell as profoundly disturbing and notes that they will be, for lots of atheists,
the basis of their unbelief. Hart’s position, although it is one that I personally support, may,
however, be questioned by some Christians who will point to references in the New
Testament relating to hell that Hart chooses to ignore.
In summary, Hart’s project is rich in possibilities for informing the conversation
between Christianity and atheism. Within the Orthodox tradition, he stands as the most
prominent thinker to have examined atheism and unbelief and his work contains many
resources that offer a starting point for the Church to use as it works to engage
constructively with atheism and atheists. Perhaps most importantly, Hart challenges
atheists to reconceive of God in ways that are aligned with classical Christian thought, he
points to a dimension of human experience, namely beauty, in which the infinity and peace
of God may be mysteriously encountered, and he works out a theology of salvation that is
all-encompassing, generous and universal, even though his soteriology may be disputed by
some Christians. Hart’s work, it should be acknowledged, is unlikely to be widely read by
atheists and his theology may well be dismissed by those who reject the existence of God.
Nonetheless, it is my view that Hart is a highly perceptive, insightful and provocative
thinker who has, in his extensive suite of publications, developed a set of valuable
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resources that the Church may draw upon as it engages in the challenging task of patiently
listening to and constructively talking with atheists.
5.2.3 Henri de Lubac: A Catholic response to atheist
humanism
As I discussed in Chapter 4, atheism was a preoccupation of Henri de Lubac throughout
his career. Amongst Catholic theologians, de Lubac is preeminent as a thinker who took
atheism seriously, developed a significant interest in its place within society and who offers
a range of meaningful resources that may assist the Church in working towards a
constructive dialogue between Christianity and atheism. Dialogue with unbelievers of
various types, both in his personal experiences of serving in the French army during the
First World War (encounters that prompted him to write his work The Discovery of God)
and in his theologically-framed engagements with Comte, Feuerbach, Proudhon, Marx and
Nietzsche, were to be crucial in stimulating de Lubac’s interest in atheism. Indeed, de
Lubac respected what atheism can offer to the Christian faith. The atheist, for de Lubac,
can be the one ‘who provides the salt that will prevent my ideas of God from petrifying
and so becoming false.’892
The issues of atheism, secularism and humanism pervade de Lubac’s entire project,
colouring his writing about the supernatural and its relationship to the natural, as well as
prompting deep unease about the state of the Church. In this latter context, de Lubac was
wary both of a secularised and purely sociological view of the Church and by the inveterate
individualism of modern culture, which he saw invading people’s approach to worship and
their relationship to the Church.893 De Lubac regarded the social and collectivist atheism
892 DG, 188. 893 Raymond Moloney, "Henri de Lubac on Church and Eucharist," Irish Theological Quarterly 70, no. 4
(2005): 334.
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that he witnessed in the West, particularly in connection with Communism, as
fundamentally out of step with the recognition of persons in their irreducible value.894
In common with both Jüngel and Hart, de Lubac identified the Church as a key
contributing factor in the emergence of modern unbelief and atheism and therefore
underlined the principle explored in this thesis that belief and unbelief are complexly
interwoven phenomena. His focus, however, is rather different from these two thinkers.
Where Jüngel traces the genealogy of atheism through forms of metaphysical theism that
seek to demonstrate the necessity of God and which construct a picture of God’s essence
in abstract terms that is detached from the historical reality of this world, and where Hart
focuses most pointedly on the Christian doctrine of hell (which he regards as the principal
source of a Christian-generated atheism) and the experiences of human suffering as
grounds for unbelief (which he argues have been addressed inadequately by the Church),
de Lubac’s central concern was with the dualistic theological legacy of neoscholasticism,
which separated grace from nature.
There are several areas in de Lubac’s theology that I believe offer particular promise in
connection with Christianity’s dialogue with atheists. The first of these concerns de
Lubac’s understanding of the social nature of the Church and his related doctrine of
collective salvation although there is some uncertainty about whether de Lubac was, in
fact, a thoroughgoing universalist with respect to the question of human salvation. The
second arena in which themes in de Lubac’s project can form the starting point for
potentially fruitful conversations with certain expressions of atheism is the sphere of the
natural. De Lubac’s notion that nature is already graced and that the natural and
supernatural effectively coinhere offers the potential for a theologically-grounded
conversation to begin with those philosophical perspectives that emphasise the identity of
reality with the immanent frame and which, for this reason, focus on the horizontal, rather
than the vertical, horizon of human experience. Finally, de Lubac, like Jüngel, is alert to
the need for the Church to be self-critical and to heed the voice of the atheist. He recognises
894 Aidan Nichols, Divine Fruitfulness: A Guide Through Balthasar's Theology Beyond the Trilogy
(London: Continuum, 2007), 61-62.
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in the atheist critique of Christianity certain truths that need to be confronted and used as
a starting point in the renewal of faith. Each of these aspects of de Lubac’s project will be
discussed in the remainder of this section.
The key issue to focus on at this juncture is the potential that de Lubac’s soteriology
offers to the Church in its dialogue with those who are not part of its visible structure. De
Lubac, like Hart and other theologians who affirm universal salvation, offers a vision of
human destiny that is exceptionally generous, rooted in the patristic understanding of
God’s love and salvific intention being made available to the whole world. Drawing on a
principle that is present in many of the writings of the Fathers, de Lubac stresses the
collective nature of salvation, which is based on the mysterious bonds that unite humanity,
and, for this reason, the corporate nature of Christianity is a basic premise of his thought.895
‘The unity of the human family as a whole is the subject, we have said, of some of the
deepest yearnings of our age.’896 De Lubac’s communion ecclesiology is, then, founded on
a vision of radical inclusivity. It is clear from his work Catholicism that de Lubac identifies
the Church, or the Mystical Body as he calls it, at least potentially, as the whole of the
human race.897 His understanding of catholicity is grounded in a generous and open
embrace of all that is good, worthy and true and it is clear that his inclusive vision informs
his entire theological project. Catholicism, for de Lubac, implies the inclusion of all human
beings in their depth and mystery.
In the context of the dialogue between Christians and atheists, the importance of de
Lubac’s communion ecclesiology, and his insistence that salvation is essentially collective,
is, I believe, enormous. I recognise, of course that whether unbelievers can make sense of
eschatological notions such as salvation and eternal life is another matter entirely, and it
895 Moloney, "Henri de Lubac on Church and Eucharist," 334. 896 C, 195. 897 ‘… the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, a supernatural unity, supposes a previous unity of the
human race.’ C, 3. This aspect of de Lubac's soteriology is discussed by Susan Wood in Wood, Spiritual
Exegesis and the Church in the Theology of Henri de Lubac, 79-85. It is a notion that is also expressed by
Pope John Paul II, who described the Incarnation as ‘the taking up into unity with Christ not only of human
nature, but in this human nature, in a sense, of everything that is “flesh”: the whole of humanity, the entire
visible and material world.’ Cited in Shortt, God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity, 107.
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may be that for many atheists such doctrines are out of place and lack validity within their
worldview. However, the generosity of de Lubac’s vision does, nonetheless, provide a
starting point for the Church to highlight its reach within the whole of humanity, to
underline the love of God for all people (and, indeed, for the whole of creation), to counter
the oft-repeated objection that Christianity is solely about individuals obtaining salvation
for themselves, and to articulate a conception of human unity under God’s reign that
transcends religious identity or belonging to the Church.898 De Lubac’s thought was to gain
formal expression in the conciliar documents to emerge from Vatican II, particularly article
16 of Lumen gentium, where it is acknowledged that ‘people who have not yet received the
Gospel are related to the People of God in various ways,’ a statement that is followed by
an endorsement of the possibility of salvation being available for all people.899 The position
of the Catholic Church, as expressed in Lumen gentium, on the salvation of unbelievers
clearly bears the imprint of de Lubac’s thought and is of great significance for the wider
Church and for the dialogue between Christians and atheists.900
The second arena in which I believe de Lubac offers both the Church and wider society
much that is important concerns his theology of the supernatural. For de Lubac, the natural
and supernatural dimensions of reality are interwoven.901 I consider this to be one of de
Lubac’s most significant insights. It has its corollary in political theology, which is the
refusal of any notion of a purely secular state, and it provides an important basis for atheist-
Christian dialogue. The Church and its practices will necessarily be part of any stable, free
898 For an extended discussion of the question of whether atheists can be saved, see Bullivant, Faith and
Unbelief, 71-94. 899 ‘Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who
nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they
know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation.’ Flannery,
Vatican, Council II: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, Volume 1, 367. The spirit of
sympathetic concern for the motives and feelings of atheists, and an approach to atheism and agnosticism
that is marked by openness and respect, is also evident in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Ecclesiam suam,
which was given on 6th August 1964. 900 This is the starting point for Stephen Bullivant’s fascinating and important exploration of the place of
the salvation of atheists within Catholic dogmatic theology, a work that traces the history of Catholic
thought on this issue from anathama to dialogue, and which draws extensively on the thought of both Henri
de Lubac and Karl Rahner. Bullivant, The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology. 901 Grumett, De Lubac: A Guide for the Perplexed, 149.
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society and civil authorities must provide space for them.902 As is also true for Jüngel, de
Lubac’s conception of the worldly sphere as graced provides scope for the Christian
affirmation of the material and the natural and offers scope for the development of a
dialogue with both individuals and philosophical systems that wish to stress the horizontal
(or immanent) field of human experience in opposition to a vertical (or transcendent)
conception of existence and being, a position that tends to be associated, although not
exclusively so, with Type IV atheism. In a society where there is a growing indifference to
transcendent valuations of life, de Lubac’s project provides the starting point for the
Church to highlight the connection between the natural and the supernatural and to point
to the orientation of all creatures to God, as their creator. In connection with the social
sphere, it should also be added that de Lubac’s thoughtful and constructive engagements
with Buddhism provides a very helpful model for inter-religious dialogue and interfaith
understanding, which highlights how Christianity can learn from a Dharmic faith.903 Given
the concern that some unbelievers have about the multiplicity of religious traditions within
contemporary society, which may be interpreted as confusing and at odds with the notion
of a single expression of truth, de Lubac’s willingness to draw connections between two
very different traditions may be instructive.
The third area of de Lubac’s project that I wish to highlight concerns his sensitivity to
the warranted criticism of the Church and of certain forms of Christianity that can be found
within atheistic argumentation. This is particularly the case, de Lubac argues, in the case
of Nietzsche’s opposition to Christianity. As Grumett notes,
De Lubac argues convincingly that Nietzsche's protest is not, in fact, against Christian faith
per se, but against the Christianity of his own time, asking rhetorically: 'His cutting scorn is
aimed at our mediocrities and hypocrisies; he aims at our weaknesses embellished with
902 Grumett, De Lubac: A Guide for the Perplexed, 149. 903 De Lubac had a deep interest in Buddhism and published a number of imporatnt works on this religious
tradition. See de Lubac, Aspects of Buddhism; de Lubac, "The Notion of Good and Evil in Buddhism and
Especially in Amidism."; de Lubac, La rencontre du Bouddhisme et de l'occident; de Lubac, "Buddhist
Messianism?." For an examination of de Lubac’s engagements with Buddhism, see David Grumett, "De
Lubac, Christ and the Buddha," New Blackfriars 89, no. 1020 (2008).
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fine names. Can we blame him completely? Must everything that "bears the name of
Christian today" be defended against him?’904
This observation leads de Lubac to underline the importance of self-criticism for the
Church, a process that he believes demonstrates discernment, judgement and choice. An
appropriately self-critical attitude is:
…a striving for realism in action – a determination to bar all that cannot justify its claim to
genuineness. It is an examination carried out in humility, capable of recognizing the good
achieved, but out of an essentially apostolic discontent and a perpetually restless spiritual
dynamism.905
The humility that de Lubac indicates is a characteristic of self-criticism is important and
needs to inform the Christian response to the justifiable criticism that can be expressed by
atheists in a reaction against what they may see as the deficiencies of the Church within
the social sphere, in its historical record and in its moral position on some issues that face
humanity. Where this attitude is present, the possibilities for constructive conversations
and fruitful dialogue will be extended. As Grumett argues, ‘criticism of the Church is, at
its best, self-criticism… [it is] an attempt to plumb the depths of the truth and tradition of
faith in Christ by means of attentive and rigorous theological and historical
discernment.’906 The observations remind Christians that in their interactions with atheists
an attitude that is humble, reflective and self-critical will be important if mutual
understanding and trust are to be developed.
I consider that De Lubac’s analysis of the predicament facing humanity in the modern
era, which is characterised by growing secularism, atheist humanism and a watered-down,
superficial form of Christianity, is remarkably perceptive and remains relevant to this day
as the Church grapples with the challenge of religious indifference (identified in Chapter
1 with Type III atheism) or, worse, hostility to various forms of faith and belief (a position
904 Grumett, De Lubac: A Guide for the Perplexed, 111. The quotation is taken from de Lubac’s work
Theology in History, 495. 905 de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church, 284-85. 906 Grumett, De Lubac: A Guide for the Perplexed, 132.
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more closely associated with Type I and Type II atheism). De Lubac certainly offers a set
of very important resources for Church and Christian theology as they seek to develop a
constructive dialogue with the increasing number of people within society who reject the
existence of God and who are often critical of institutional religion, whether this is
expressed as scepticism about the place of the Church within contemporary society, the
denunciation of Islamist extremism, or in various forms of anti-Semitism, which persists
within contemporary society.
5.3 Engaging with different categories of
atheism
The four-fold typology of atheism, which I introduced and discussed in Chapter 1,
demonstrates that atheism is far from a monolithic or homogenous phenomenon and that
there are different reasons why people who reject the existence of God may adopt their
position. At the outset, it should be recognised that, as Timothy Keller asserts, ‘non-belief
in God is itself an act of faith, because there is no way to prove that the world and all that
is within it and its deep mathematical orderliness and matter itself all simply exist on their
own as brute facts with no source outside themselves.’907
In this section I will return to my typology and note the approaches that may be adopted
by Christians as they seek to develop a constructive dialogue with the different expressions
of atheism that are associated with the typology. I will highlight the specific stumbling
blocks to belief associated with the four categories of atheism and offer remarks on the
potential for dialogue with each position. I am aware that each category of atheism in the
typology will present its own challenges that may, on occasions, make dialogue with
Christians difficult. However, the rewards of developing a mutual understanding between
Christians and the different types of atheist discussed here are considerable and, although
907 Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Sceptical (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
2016), 227.
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dialogue will never be straightforward, the impetus to pursue an agenda of patient listening,
mutual learning, and productive discussion between Christians and each expression of
atheism is real and pressing one.
5.3.1 Type I atheism
As I noted in Chapter 1, Type I atheism is grounded in the application of reason and logic
to the question of God’s existence and focuses on the purported lack of evidence for
religious, specifically Christian, belief. Sometimes, particularly by New Atheist thinkers,
the Christian faith is presented as a hypothesis to be tested, rather like a scientific idea.
Type I atheists will stress the lack of evidence for God’s existence and argue that those
who believe in the reality of God despite the absence of such evidence are foolish.
Christians may find this a difficult argument to refute because their faith is in God who is
spirit, a presence in the world that is, in some sense, profoundly mysterious and
unknowable. My own experience of faith has been a highly complex one and, although it
has taken me through the process of training for ordination as an Anglican priest, it has
been severely tested at times as a result of bereavement and a journey through serious
illness.
I therefore accept that the evidence for faith will not be subject to scientific scrutiny,
which atheists often argue rules out the possibility of miracles,908 but will lie within the
sphere of personal experience, specifically in acts of prayer, contemplation, and worship,
as well as in engagement with the riches of the Bible and the works of other Christian
authors. These have all been important to me personally in my life of faith. Theists,
however, may argue that only someone who is omniscient and omnipresent can say from
his or her pool of knowledge that there is definitively no God because the absolute denial
of God’s existence requires infinite knowledge.909 I believe that Type I atheism needs to
be taken seriously and carefully understood, for the issue of evidence is clearly an
908 Rhodes, Answering the Objections of Atheists, Agnostics, and Skeptics, 63-76. 909 Rhodes, Answering the Objections of Atheists, Agnostics, and Skeptics, 30-31.
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important factor in driving this form of unbelief. I suggest that Christians may encounter
in this expression of atheism a mode of unbelief that can offer a purificatory role in helping
them to reflect on their own faith and the religious convictions that are associated with it.
Of my three dialogue partners, Eberhard Jüngel gives the most serious attention to the
arguments of Type I atheists although David Bentley Hart, particularly as he engages with
the New Atheist movement, also offers responses to this expression of atheism.
5.3.2 Type II atheism
As I noted in Chapter 1, Type II atheists are far less interested in matters of reason and
evidence in relation to the question of God and will emphasise the concerns that they have
about God as an authoritarian presence who opposes the human will. Their resistance or
rebellion will be based on a hostility to Christianity and a revulsion about the notion of
God, and their focus will be on the replacement of God by humanity as the supreme
principle within the organisation and development of society. This form of ‘substitutionary
humanism,’ which was powerfully articulated by Feuerbach, but which persists to this day,
finds expression in an emotional, rather than intellectual, opposition to God, as well as an
objection to the role of the Church within Western societies. Although Eberhard Jüngel,
David Bentley Hart and Henri de Lubac all engage with the thought of Type II atheists
(notably Feuerbach and Nietzsche), other Christians may struggle to counter the arguments
of Type II atheists for they are drawn on what may be acknowledged to be legitimate
principles of atheist humanism that prove to be highly refractory to alternative positions.
Type II atheists may conceive of God as a despotic deity who is opposed to human freedom
and who demands obedience and adherence to a strict moral code. This is not a perspective
on God that I support and I believe that the notion of a despotic God needs to be challenged
by stressing the qualities of love, mercy, peace, beauty, and forgiveness, which are amongst
the attributes of God as God is conceived within Christianity. As with the position of Type
I atheists, although for different reasons, I suggest that the perspectives of Type II atheists,
particularly in the conception of a controlling and oppressive deity, may offer an important
starting point for the purification of Christianity’s understanding of the nature of God and
also as an opportunity to re-educate atheists about how God is understood by Christians.
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5.3.3 Type III atheism
Type III atheism is less about intellectual argumentation or emotional rebellion in relation
to the question of God’s existence and much more closely connected to a lack of interest
in religious concerns and a failure to engage with matters of belief. I would suggest that it
is probably the most widely-held position today in secular Western societies and is
especially common amongst teenagers and young adults. I am also aware that some people
in this category may not be entirely dismissive of the possibility of an unseen and
unreachable dimension to human experience, despite their lack of engagement with
organised religious institutions, and may describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not
religious.’ This openness to the spiritual may be encountered in their interest in art, music,
literature, the beauty of the world, or even in sacred architecture, and it can provide a
valuable arena of common ground with Christians that may prompt meaningful
conversations and a fruitful form of dialogue. I have met many people, whose position I
respect, who describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’ and this is a position that
is becoming an increasingly common one to hold within contemporary Western societies.
David Bentley Hart and Henri de Lubac both offer insights into the secularisation of
Western society and resources that can contribute to the development of a dialogue with
Type III atheists. I suggest that Hart’s emphasis on beauty as a medium for the human
encounter with divinity is especially helpful in this respect.
5.3.4 Type IV atheism
Type IV atheism is quite different from the other categories of atheism discussed above in
that it is rooted in philosophical positions that emphasise the sheer materiality of reality,
the irreversible nature of the ‘death of God’ within Western societies, and an ontology that
is securely laid out on what Deleuze refers to as the ‘plane of immanence.’ Type IV atheists
construct atheological frameworks that, although they may still draw upon religious themes
(as is evident in the work of Badiou, Deleuze, and Nancy), move towards the eradication
of divinity or transcendence within human worldly experience. This category of atheism
will, again, not be an easy one for Christian to engage with. However, as I have already
noted, the thought of my dialogue partners, Eberhard Jüngel, David Bentley Hart, and
Henri de Lubac, does provide resources that point to the presence and experience of God
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within this world that may offer a starting point for the development of a dialogue between
Christianity and Type IV atheism. Indeed, the thought of each of these theologians provides
a helpful resource for overcoming the binary distinction between atheism and Christianity.
5.4 Approaches to dialogue
Having reviewed the key themes in the theological perspectives on atheism in the work of
Jüngel, Hart and de Lubac, and the resources that they have made available to the Church
in its task of entering into a conversation with atheism, and having noted the approaches
that can be adopted in engaging with each of the expressions of atheism that constitute the
typology I have offered in this thesis, in this section I will examine further aspects of the
dialogue that Christians may look to open up with unbelievers in a way that is constructive,
open and respectful. I will highlight the need of the Church to recognise that there are, for
many people, substantial and perhaps insurmountable, barriers to faith, which stand in the
way of belief in God or of any form of religious identity. I will also identify the latent
religiosity that may continue to persist in some forms of atheism, along with an ongoing
openness to transcendence that can be a characteristic of populations even within secular
Western societies. At the heart of a respectful and constructive dialogue between atheists
and Christians will be a recognition that the two positions are closely connected and that a
binary distinction between unbelief and belief with respect to God may not always be
straightforward to sustain. With this point in mind, I next outline a set of principles that
need to underpin the fruitful conversations between atheists and Christians that are needed
if both groups are to live together harmoniously and respectfully in our complex
contemporary society which continues to be shaped by both secular and religious currents.
Finally, I will comment on the religious value of atheism and the learning that the Church
may derive from those who deny the reality of God.
Firstly, it is clear that the question of God (die Gottesfrage) is a fundamental one, and
that the matter is deeply interwoven with the issue of what it means to be human,
preoccupying religious adherents and unbelievers alike. The matter of God’s existence or
non-existence will continue to dominate discourse on religious themes for some time to
come with both Christians and atheists able to offer perspectives on this issue from which
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the other group may have much to learn. A key task of the Church in engaging with atheists
and other kinds of unbelievers is to accept, therefore, that unbelief is now widespread
within Western societies, as well as in other parts of the world. This need not be lamented
and instead should be accepted. However, even as atheism is recognised as an increasingly
common form of identity, as I outlined in Section 1.4, it will be important for Christians to
try to understand the reasons that are advanced for the denial of God’s existence.
A second principle of dialogue concerns the way in which Christianity is often
dismissed far too hastily and is poorly understood by many of its detractors today. Indeed,
the idea of God that is attacked by those who reject God’s existence often bears little
resemblance to the understanding of God that is held by Christians. There are, therefore,
circumstances, particularly in connection with atheist caricatures of the Christian
conception of God that are frequently articulated by unbelievers, where the views of
atheists should be challenged. A third principle I propose is that atheism and agnosticism
are perfectly understandable and valid positions for individuals to hold in society today.
There may be a boldness and grandeur of vision associated with some aspects of the
atheistic rhetoric and Christians should accept the rational validity of the atheist stance.
Similarly, atheists may be able to acknowledge some of the important contributions that
Christianity (as well as other religious traditions) has made and continues to make within
Western culture. This may be in connection with its art, architecture, musical legacy, and
in the role that churches play in promoting social well-being and in advancing justice,
mercy, and peace.
The fourth principle is connected with the need for atheists and Christians to listen
attentively and carefully to each other. Atheists need to be listened to with patience and
humility, rather than be demonised or condemned by Christians who are unable to hear the
important insights that they can offer with respect to both the Christian faith and the
standing of the Church. The same is also true of atheists, who should give due respect to
the views of Christians even where they may disagree with their beliefs. Perhaps the most
appropriate religious response to atheism is to genuinely engage with it and to ask atheists
questions such as ‘What is it like to be you?’ and ‘What challenges do you face living in a
culture with a Christian history?’ Alas, this does not always happen and the stereotypes
that believers and unbelievers sometimes hold about each other persist. They can be
unhelpful and undermine, rather than encourage, serious engagement, learning and
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dialogue. Sadly, slogans such as ‘religion is evil,’ and ‘atheists are going to hell’ still frame
the discussions that form part of atheist-Christian dialogue. Such viewpoints, which I
encountered on numerous occasions during my time working as a university chaplain, do
little to promote mutual understanding between the two groups.
As I have already underlined in this thesis, it is also the case that the binary distinction
between theism and atheism is often illusory, and that Christianity and atheism are much
more closely connected than may sometimes appear to be the case. It is a key theme within
my thesis and is certainly a point that is well understood by all of the interlocutors that I
have entered into dialogue with. This point has also been carefully articulated by other
thinkers, including the atheist philosopher John Gray, the Marxist Catholic literary theorist
Terry Eagleton, the Catholic theologian John Caputo, the Catholic philosopher Charles
Taylor, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, the contemporary English philosopher
Christopher Watkin, and the theologians and cultural critics Kutter Callaway and Barry
Taylor.910
A sixth and final principle, which I believe to be crucial and very much at the heart of
this thesis, concerns the profound learning that individual Christians and the wider Church
can derive from a range of atheistic critiques. As T.S. Eliot wrote in a letter to Richard
Aldington in 1927, ‘Atheism should always be encouraged (i.e., rationalistic not emotional
atheism) for the sake of Faith.’911 Atheists can therefore encourage Christian theology and
the Church itself to be appropriately self-critical and, in so doing, provoke renewed
thinking about the nature of God, the way in which the gospel is articulated in
contemporary society, and about the place of the Church in culture today. In this sense,
910 See Callaway and Taylor, The Aesthetics of Atheism: Theology and Imagination in Contemporary
Culture. 911 Cited in Spencer, Atheists: The Origin of the Species, vii. John Macquarrie makes the same point:
‘There is such as thing as straightforward atheism, and it deserves to be treated with respect, as one
possible interpretation of this ambiguous universe in which we find ourselves.’ John Macquarrie,
"Believing in God Today" (paper presented at the The Adelaide College of Divinity Annual Lecture in
Theology, 1988), 1-2.
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atheism provides a genuine opportunity for the Church to both reflect on its own identity
and faith, and to engage with the culture within which it stands in a constructive way.
As Rupert Shortt correctly states, ‘all serious religious practice ought to involve healthy
doses of self-criticism.’912 It is also the case, of course, that atheists have something to
learn from those who hold religious beliefs, which is a theme that has been explored by
several atheist authors, including Ronald Dworkin,913 Alain de Botton,914 and Tim
Crane,915 and which is examined in some detail by Guy Collins as he interrogates the
thought of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek.916 In order for more
atheist-Christian dialogue to occur, which I believe is a crucial process in building a
harmonious society, atheists and Christians may need to abandon the either/or dichotomy
that often frames the discussion between them and seek to better understand the complex
cultural and sociological forces that define someone’s relationship to religion.
5.4.1 The relationship between faith and reason
One of the most frequently cited arguments for atheism concerns the proposition that it is
unreasonable and that rational thought must preclude the possibility of affirming the
existence of an invisible God. This notion raises the long-standing issue of the relationship
between reason and faith. In the context of the debate with Type I atheists, especially the
New Atheists, faith means ‘belief without evidence.’ According to leading atheist thinkers,
such as Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, there is no empirical evidence that can confirm the
object of Christian faith, namely the reality of God.917 Jüngel, Hart, and de Lubac all use
reason to explicate the faith that they hold and affirm the philosophical traditions to which
Christianity is wedded. Faith and reason for these thinkers are not in conflict in the way
912 Shortt, God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity, 31. 913 Dworkin, Religion without God. 914 Alain De Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (New York:
Vintage International, 2013). 915 Tim Crane, The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist's Point of View (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017). 916 Guy Collins, Faithful Doubt: The Wisdom of Uncertainty (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014). 917 Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, 44-45.
243
envisaged by the New Atheists. Hart argues, for example, that it is entirely appropriate to
believe in both God and in reason but not in one without the other.918 Despite affirming the
role of reason in Christian theology, Christian theologians also acknowledge its limitations.
De Lubac argues that the idea of God is preconceptual. It is naturally present to the human
mind prior to any explicit reasoning or objective conceptualisation.919 He also believes that
the power of affirmation is greater than that of conception or argument.920 Hart also notes
that theology has contributed to forms of nihilism, particularly the philosophical
nominalism associated with William of Ockham, which shattered the unity of faith and
reason.921
Problems arise when Christians seek to utilise reason-based arguments for God in their
dialogue with atheists, whether these are derived from natural theology, involve
cosmological arguments, arguments from design or arguments from religious experience.
They may also call upon some adaptation of Thomas’ Quinque viæ, which takes these
arguments out of their context as ways for believers to come to know God by reason and
misunderstands them as an apologetic resource. The so-called arguments for God’s
existence rarely succeed in persuading unbelievers of the credibility of religious belief and
may, in fact, involve a category error. For the basis of atheism for many, notably Type II
and Type III atheists, is not necessarily centred on rational argumentation. It is, instead,
connected with emotional and instinctive factors.922 Confronting such atheists with reasons
to believe in God is unlikely to be an effective strategy and it may be more appropriate for
Christians to simply acknowledge that atheism will persist in contemporary society and
accept that there are legitimate and understandable grounds for reasonable unbelief.
918 EG, 19. 919 DG, 54. Jacques Maritain makes the same point in stating that the human mind ‘before entering the
sphere of completely formed and articulated knowledge… is indeed capable of a prephilosophical
knowledge.’ Jacques Maritain, Approaches to God, trans. Peter O'Reilly (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 5. 920 DG, 112. 921 TBI, 133. 922 Joseph L. Walsh, "The Confrontation between Belief and Unbelief," CrossCurrents 15, no. 1 (1965):
45.
244
In the context of the dialogue between Christians and atheists, the question of reason
and how it is connected to faith is a complex one. Christians may need to challenge the
atheistic notion that faith can be reduced to a series of propositions that are given
intellectual assent and emphasise the mystical, experiential, and intuitive nature of faith.
Faith may be better characterised as trust or hope, rather than as an outcome of logic.923
Faith may, of course, still be accompanied by belief in the doctrines of the Church and will
seek to make sense of these in the theological enterprise of fides quaerens intellectum (faith
seeking understanding). The resources offered by apophatic theology and the long history
of Christian mysticism, which both stress the unknowability of God, may be helpful for
Christians as they seek to articulate the way in which God is apprehended in his
hiddenness.924 As Elizabeth Johnson states, ‘the reality of God is mystery beyond all
imagining [and] we can never wrap our minds completely around this mystery.’925 The
humility to acknowledge doubt and uncertainty may also highlight how challenging the
holding of a position of faith can be for some Christians and temper the caricature of people
of faith as those who always hold certain convictions about the nature of God.
5.4.2 The question of transcendence
A further arena that I consider to be a provide a fruitful starting point for atheists and
Christians to engage in dialogue concerns the notion of transcendence. Atheists and
Christians may understand this term in different ways. In my experience, many atheists
will, quite understandably, locate that which is transcendent within the material realm
923 As Kierkegaard asserts in The Sickness unto Death, John Habgood argues that being a Christian is more
like falling in love than solving a philosophical problem. John Habgood, Varieties of Unbelief (London:
Darton Longman & Todd, 2000), 27. Similarly, Eagleton argues that faith is not about a choice but derived
from grace. ‘Faith is a gift from God and Christians are rarely in conscious possession of all the reasons
why they believe in God.’ Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 138. In discussing von Balthasar’s negative theology, Lösel
makes the same point: ‘Faith is not a human work but, rather, God’s grace at work in us.’ Lösel, "Love
Divine, All Loves Excelling: Balthasar's Negative Theology of Revelation," 598. 924 The medieval devotional classic The Cloud of Unknowing highlights the very issue raised here: ‘For
though we through the grace of God can fully know about all other matters, and think about them – yes,
even the very works of God himself – yet of God himself no man can think.’ The Cloud of Unknowing,
trans. Clifton Wolters (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), 59. 925 Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, 7.
245
whilst many Christians will locate transcendence within an invisible and unreachable
divine realm. In acknowledging the former position, it will be important for Christians to
recognise that transcendence may have a horizontal as well as a vertical dimension. This
recognition allows Christian theology to learn much from the radically immanent forms of
philosophy that characterise Type IV atheism. The thought of Gilles Deleuze, who was
discussed in Chapter 1, notably his assertion that reality is confined to the ‘plane of
immanence,’ is particularly conducive to Christian reinterpretation. For, although Deleuze
is generally critical of religion and constructs a form of anti-theology, he does not claim
that philosophy is necessarily atheistic and recognises that the idea of God can function as
‘a transcendent ideal which incites us to take thought beyond the limits of possible
experience.’926 As I noted in Chapter 1, Deleuzian theology therefore represents a secular
trajectory for Christian thought and presents a radical recasting of theology as a thinking
of transcendence within immanence – a theology within, of and for the world, the saeculum
– of and on the plane of immanence. For this reason, a number of theologians who follow
Deleuze’s impulse towards immanence, as well as to anti-hierarchical, anti-organisational
ontologies, as they seek to develop theologies of the material world, find in Deleuzian
thought an alternative site to think about God.927 Thus, notwithstanding his atheism,
Deleuze is able to resource important developments in immanent forms of Christian
theology, such as creation-centred eco-theologies, body-centred expressions of feminist
theology, and politically-motivated liberation theologies.928 He therefore represents a key
atheistic thinker from which the Church may learn a great deal as it works out a theology
that focuses on this-worldly manifestations of God’s presence. This same terrain is
explored by Fiona Ellis in her notion of theistic, or expansive, naturalism. This ‘involves
acknowledging that we are natural beings in a natural world, and gives expression to the
demand that we avoid metaphysical flights of fancy and ensure that our claims remain
empirically grounded’ as well as a recognition that ‘God is not part of the natural world.’
926 Philip Goodchild, "Why is Philosophy So Compromised with God?," in Deleuze and Religion, ed. Mary
Bryden (London: Routledge, 2000), 156. 927 Simpson, Deleuze and Theology, 52, 77. 928 Kristien Justaert, Theology after Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2012), 34-37, 49-52, 132.
246
She argues that our understanding of the traditional naturalism versus theism debate must
be reconfigured, and that ‘both naturalism and theism can be true.’929
5.4.3 Christian ministry in an age of unbelief
Karl Rahner noted that
Christianity has entered upon an epoch which presents it with a fundamental challenge and
for which there has never yet been a precedent… church-related Christianity has not yet
become sufficiently aware of its radically new situation today [and] is conducting itself
with more or less anxious defensiveness.930
I have highlighted in this thesis how atheism and unbelief present a significant challenge
to the Church within an increasingly secular society and I envisage this challenge is only
likely to grow and intensify over the coming years. It appears that the era of Christendom
in the West is drawing to a close and that we are moving into what might be called a post-
Christendom period. Although census data suggests that Christianity remains the largest
religious category within the United Kingdom, this label will be for many a largely cultural
one and provides little evidence either for an active faith commitment or regular
participation in acts of Christian worship. Church attendance has dropped dramatically in
recent years, churches have become largely marginalised within contemporary society,
levels of biblical literacy are declining, and Christian values exert very little influence on
the majority of the population.
I consider that the key question for the Church as a whole and, indeed, for each
individual church community, is how the challenge of atheism and unbelief can be
addressed in a constructive and meaningful way. The challenge will be to identify ways of
engaging with atheism that are not marked by the anxious defensiveness that Rahner
describes. Mindful of the principles for dialogue that I outlined above, in the remainder of
929 Fiona Ellis, God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2-3. 930 Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vol. 21: Science and Christian Faith, trans. Hugh M. Riley
(London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1988), 138.
247
this chapter, I will outline some approaches that may be helpful for Christians as they seek
to engage with those who deny the existence of God and who may hostile to the presence
of the Church in contemporary society.
5.4.4 Patient listening
As I have already noted, there is no doubt that Christians need to take the atheist critique
seriously and to listen to atheists with patience, sensitivity, charity, and humility. This will
involve an acknowledgement that both unbelief in its harder or resolute form of positive
(or explicit) atheism, and in its softer manifestations as either negative (or implicit) atheism
or agnosticism, are reasonable and understandable worldviews for people to hold in society
today. They are increasingly widespread perspectives within Western culture and are likely
to become more significant over the years to come. Consequently, these are positions that
need to be engaged with carefully and thoughtfully. This trend is particularly apparent
amongst students and other young people, many of whom have rejected the religion of
their childhood years, and now identify as having no religious affiliation or, if they do
retain some spiritual values as ‘spiritual but not religious,’ practice a form of individualised
consumer spirituality that has been termed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Such a position
stems from a belief that God wants the individual to be good, that God can have a
therapeutic function to help them feel good and that God is a decorative concept rather than
an active agent in the world.931 It represents a belief system that is not necessarily hostile
to the notion of God’s existence or reality but may still eschew a formal religious
commitment.
As I have argued earlier in this thesis, atheism can offer to the Church a purificatory
function and be the source of learning for Christians. Rather than resistance and
denunciation, Christians will do well instead to enter into respectful dialogue and
conversation with atheists in an effort to understand their objections to religion and the
931 See Andrew Root, Faith Formation in a Secular Age : Responding to the Church's Obsession with
Youthfulness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), xv-xxii, esp xvi.
248
Church as well as the basis for their denial of God. I have found from personal experience
that this is entirely possible as I have a number of friends and colleagues who identify as
atheists but who, nonetheless, retain a strong interest in religion and acknowledge the
important role that religious communities play within our society. I have found that not all
atheists are hostile to the place of faith in society and certain understandings of secularism
will allow for the expression of religious commitment within a pluralistic culture.
Considerate and honest engagement between believers and unbelievers may therefore be
possible under some circumstances and yield important insights for both parties. This may
be achieved in a number of different settings: in the workplace, in chaplaincy bases, in
structured interfaith dialogue programmes (to which unbelievers may be invited), within
friendship groups, and in more formal debates and discussions that may be set up by both
religious and secular bodies. These are all scenarios that I have had personal experience
of.
In university environments, despite the efforts made by chaplains to promote and
facilitate constructive dialogue, it must be acknowledged, however, that the exchanges
between Christians and atheists will not always be harmonious. As a university chaplain I
found that Christians, particularly those engaged in evangelistic endeavours, came across
as self-satisfied, judgemental and intolerant, and were likely to provoke hostile responses
from atheists and other non-Christians (including members of other religious traditions)
who were be dismissive of their views. Alas, I found that dialogue between believers and
unbelievers, under such circumstances, was rarely productive or constructive.932
5.4.5 Partnership and collaboration
There is little doubt that in Western societies people holding traditional religious identities,
including Christianity, which has been the focus of this study, a range of more diffuse
932 For an extended discussion of this issue, based on data collected from several universities in the United
Kingdom, see Mathew Guest et al., Christianity and the University Experience: Understanding Student
Faith (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); see also Don Thorsen, What’s True about Christianity?: An
Introduction to Christain Faith and Practice (Claremont, CA: Claremont Press, 2020), 29-36.
249
spiritual orientations, and those espousing different forms of atheism, will coexist for a
long time to come. Given this reality, I believe that it is important to think about the
standards and moral values that can be held in common within a religiously diverse culture.
This will be critical if we are to live well together and move beyond the misunderstandings
and rancour that can sometimes characterise the interactions between believers and
unbelievers. In seeking common ground, the identification of values such as social
responsibility, justice, wisdom, ethical behaviour, and compassion will be both important
and helpful in enabling theists and non-theists to recognise that there are vital norms that
they share and that in doing so the possibility and potential of fruitful dialogue can be
promoted.933
Additionally, I am aware that there are many practical actions that those who do and do
not believe in God can collaborate on. I have found that there is no reason why Christians
and atheists cannot work together to support initiatives that promote social justice and
human wellbeing. This may be at an individual level or involve cooperation between
formal organisations and communities. Examples of such collaboration include the
constructive contributions that both representatives from faith communities and humanist
organisations make to public bodies such as council-run interfaith networks and Standing
Advisory Councils for Religious Education, as well as in projects such as food banks,
night-shelters, disaster relief initiatives, and in projects to address social ills such as gang
culture, knife crime and drug addiction. Churches and chaplaincies also have a long history
of offering welcome and hospitality to their local communities by hosting art exhibitions,
concerts, fêtes, memorial services, running reading groups, by promoting opportunities for
the sacred dimension in the world of the human imagination to be explored,934 and by
acting as focal points for expression of public grief in the wake of traumatic events. The
challenge to individual churches in an increasingly secular society is to become resources
for the whole of the community within which they are located and to seek to serve all of
933 Paul Hedges, Towards Better Disagreement: Religion and Atheism in Dialogue (London: Jessica
Kingsley Publishers, 2017), 172-73. 934 See Paul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol and Myth in Religion and
Theology (London: Routledge, 1999); Mark Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature (London:
Continuum, 2009).
250
the people who live in the neighbourhood whether or not those people choose to attend
acts of worship offered by the church. This service will be both practical and pastoral.935
Through the occasional offices of baptisms, weddings and funerals, churches will also
welcome family and friends of those around whom the services are centred who may not
have a faith but who are, nonetheless, open to the role of churches as centres of community
belonging. In all these ways, as Paul Tillich argues, the Church can show to those who do
not routinely attend churches that its symbolic role remains important in society today and
that the life of the Church remains meaningful for our existence as human beings. This is
particularly important in the Anglican tradition where the parish priest is charged with the
cure of all the souls in his or her parish, regardless of religious commitment. They represent
ways of demonstrating that the Christian message of salvation is ultimately a message of
healing, which is appropriate to the situation that fractured communities often find
themselves in.936
5.5 Conclusion
In this thesis I have sought to demonstrate that it is possible for the Church to develop a
constructive dialogue with atheism. I have showed that part, although by no means the
only, element in this process involves dismantling the binary distinction between
Christianity and atheism by highlighting the close relationship that exists between belief
and unbelief. I have highlighted the difficulties that emerge when these two forms of belief
and identity are posited as being in clearly opposed to each other. Drawing on Jüngel, Hart
and de Lubac, whose projects I explored in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, I have underlined the
serious attention that Christian theology must give to atheism, the parasitic relationship
between atheism and Christianity (with both positions containing concealed elements of
the other), the role of Christian thought, as well as the history and actions of the Church,
935 See Avis, A Church Drawing Near: Spirituality and Mission in a Post-Christian Culture, 155-200. 936 Tillich, Theology of Culture, 49.
251
in encouraging some expressions of atheism,937 the resources that each of my dialogue
partner offers to Christians as they enter into dialogue with atheists, and some of the lessons
that the Church may be able to derive from various atheistic critiques. I have also pointed
to the remarkable complexity and diversity of atheist positions by setting out a four-fold
typology of unbelief in which each category is internally differentiated and which also, to
some extent, overlap with each other.
As the Church looks to its future in an increasingly secular Western society it will need,
I believe, to accept that it will have a diminishing role in cultural life, remain of marginal
interest to many people and recognise that large swathes of the population will choose to
ignore it. This appears to be an irreversible trend in Western culture. However, this does
not mean that the Church needs to abandon its source of hope for humanity, which is
located in the love of God for all people as revealed in Jesus Christ. There is, I recognise,
dwindling interest in the traditional metaphysical discussion of the existence and nature of
God and I have found that claims of the various metaphysical proofs for God are commonly
ignored or dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration. For God is not a component or
object within the field of empirical investigation. God is, rather, a supra-objective ineffable
mystery who lies beyond our comprehension and can never be grasped or domesticated in
human language.938 Christians will therefore be wise to complement philosophical
discussion with action within the world. This may take purely secular forms as they affirm
the creativity, freedom and transcendence that is proper to humanity. The place of the
Church in contemporary society will be most compelling when it translates the love of God
into practical initiatives that demonstrate the qualities Jesus commended in the Beatitudes:
poverty of spirit, comforting those who mourn, meekness, pursuing righteousness in
individual and corporate life, being merciful, working for peace and even, in some parts of
the world, suffering persecution.
937 See Hedges, Towards Better Disagreement: Religion and Atheism in Dialogue, 96-108. 938 Masterson, Atheism and Alienation: A Study of the Philosophical Sources of Contemporary Atheism,
155, 57.
252
As Jüngel, Hart and de Lubac all, in different ways, argue, the affirmation of God can
promote an expansive liberation of the creative possibilities of human life because this
position remains open to the transcendent reality that touches all people. Christianity, as
Tillich notes, expresses humanity’s self-interpretation in the vertical line – the line above
to the unconditional. However, Christianity is equally able to discern the presence of God
in the horizontal plane of human relations and activities without losing its commitment to
transcendence in the vertical plane. The vertical, then, is a dynamic power that is manifest
in many different spheres of reality and every finite thing can become a bearer of the
infinite. It is the greatness of Christianity that it shows the positivity of life.939 Recognised
or not, all people are open to what Goethe describes at the end of the second part of Faust
‘the grace from above, which must participate in us.’ This grace can be found outside as
well as inside the Church, in families, the workplace, within nature. It is not confined to
religious worlds for God is greater that religion.
As I have highlighted in Jüngel’s project, the Christian vision is centred on the
penetration of the finite by the infinite as this was made known in the Incarnation. For Hart,
God’s infinity is apprehended in beauty whilst for both Hart and de Lubac, the salvation
of humanity is mediated through the presence of the Church in the world, even to those
who have no formal attachment to it.940 In these different ways the apparent meaningless
nature of human life is challenged and given meaning. It is distilled in the reconciliation
that the Apostle Paul writes of – the reconciliation between the divine and the human and
between individuals within our world. The Christian notion of agape is the love that
accepts the unacceptable, the one that is difficult to like, those who have different outlooks
and perspectives including the atheist and the unbeliever. Christians are surely charged
with the command to love all people, to respect their views even where they are contrary
to the values of the gospel, to listen to them with patience, humility, respect and sensitivity,
and to demonstrate in acts of charity, kindness, compassion, mercy, and generosity the very
939 Paul Tillich, The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message, ed. Durwood Foster (Cleveland,
Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1996), 50, 55. 940 David Bosch refers to this as ‘comprehensive salvation.’ David J. Bosch, "Transforming Mission:
Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission," (1991): 399-400.
253
love that God bestows on creation through Christ. This attitude will be at the heart of the
Church’s understanding of culture where it seeks to recognise the ultimate meaning that
shines through even the most atheistic positions and expressions. For the divine ground
shines through every creative human act. The secular realm is, then, I believe, not to be
considered godless just because it does not speak of God. To characterise the secular world
in this way is to deny God’s power over, and presence within, the world and shut God away
within religion and the Church.
A generous and compassionate Christianity will, I believe, seek not a defensive
relationship with the culture in which it is located, or to make recourse to apologetic
strategies and modes of evangelism that may be off-putting. It will need, rather, to elevate
gentle persuasion and plausibility over evidence and credibility in order to make any
headway in a postmodern culture that is suspicious of universal norms and totalising
metanarratives.941 This will be no easy task. It is likely that future surveys and the 2021
decennial census in the United Kingdom will indicate a further fall in the number of people
identifying as Christian and that church attendance will continue to decline, particularly
amongst young people. A degree of realism will therefore be required by Christians as they
confront life within a Western culture that has a dwindling regard for religious
commitment. Church communities within this context will need to adopt a number of
approaches if they are to make any connection with the people and places that surround
them. These will include community participation, affirming and valuing all who live
within the local neighbourhood, focusing on relationship-building rather than missionary
programmes, seeking to reach out rather than to draw in, using contextual language in
speech about God, recognising the power of deeds rather than words, rejecting a dualistic
understanding of the relationship between the secular and the sacred, and working tirelessly
for cultural transformation by upholding diversity, human welfare and social justice.942
941 Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm, Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World (Downers
Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 16. 942 Stuart Murray, A Vast Minority: Church and Mission in a Plural Cutlure (Milton Keynes: Paternoster,
2015), 141-42.
254
Entering into a constructive relationship with atheism will require of Christians
humility, sensitivity, honesty, and the capacity for self-criticism. It will be a difficult and
demanding process. However, in our complex society it is a challenge that I believe the
Church must face with courage and tenacity if it is to remain a viable part of Western
culture. To shirk this challenge would be to accept defeat and involve retreating into
isolation. For bridges to be built with those outside of the Church, Christians have no
choice but to acknowledge the reality of unbelief, not only in society at large but also in
their own lives.
This very point was made by Karl Barth. In the Introduction, I opened my thesis with
Barth’s honest acknowledgement of the atheist within himself in his response to Max
Bense’s essay ‘The Necessity of Atheism at the Present Day.’ His statement provides a
fitting example of how belief and unbelief can coexist within an individual and many
Christians, if they are honest, may recognise the reality that he speaks of. Despite his
recognition that atheism can lurk within the believing soul, Barth nonetheless moves on to
affirm his resolute commitment to the gospel. I will end the thesis with the full statement
that Barth made. It sounds a positive note of faith that offers a message of encouragement
to Christians today:
I know the rather sinister figure of the ‘atheist’ very well not only from books, but also
because it lurks somewhere inside me too. But I believe I know even better the real God
and the real man who is called Jesus Christ in the unity of both. He let the atheist depart
once and for all and long ago, completely, and that goes for Max Bense as well as for me.
Only in our bad dreams can we want to become ‘atheists.’943
943 Karl Barth, Fragments Grave and Gay, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: William Collins, 1971), 45-46.
255
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