Dissing Dawkins

Hardly a week goes by without a self-appointed defender of the Faith whinging about critics who call Christianity to account based on the public profile Christians both tolerate and create out in the public arena.

These geniuses' stock response to skeptics like Richard Dawkins is to loudly complain that their critique is both shallow and unfair.  Skeptics clearly haven't done the hard yards by researching the leading thinkers.  The wicked critics, they charge, have taken aim at a straw man, a laughable caricature of Christian truth.

Bulldust!

To clarify from the outset, this is neither a pro-atheistic rant, nor any kind of endorsement of the so-called New Atheists.  Rather it's a protest at the duplicity of those who regard writers like Dawkins and others as beneath them, and who have built a flattering image - an idol if you will - of what they think legitimate Christianity is like.

Christianity in the abstract is notoriously hard to pin down.  Christians can usually, however, be easily spotted.  They attend churches, buy (and occasionally read) bibles, get themselves or their kids baptised, find prayer helpful and hold an awful lot of propositions to be true regardless of the lack or otherwise of evidence.  Evidence is apparently irrelevant when truth is imparted by something called revelation.  While there are many exceptions, Christians of whatever flavour tend to be earnest, sincere folk who hold solid traditional values.  Even those who consider ourselves to be outside their fold still have friends, colleagues and relatives who inhabit that space and are, by and large, better persons for it.

Christians are the inheritors of a religion that began among fisher folk, craftspeople, slaves and illiterates.  Jesus was not a university-educated intellectual.  Nor was Peter, James or John.  While Paul wrote cryptically, he too would be hard to pigeon-hole as an academic by today's standards.  No one ever accused him of dispassionate objectivity!  Boastful and opinionated, yes; convoluted in his thinking and hugely egotistical (especially when he was claiming not to be), and a gifted, driven communicator; yes.  But he was neither an Einstein or even (thank God!) a Karl Barth.

And the people who attend Christian worship services are overwhelmingly ordinary, everyday folk.  The alleged excellencies of the theological elite tend to leave them cold.  They're there because, regardless of the theology, they're making a statement about values, community, personal and family identity, cultural inheritance... Take your pick.

Nor is it rocket science to "take the temperature" of contemporary Christianity.  Tune in to the Sunday morning TV evangelists, browse the shelves at your local Christian bookstore, have a conversation with your 'born again' brother-in-law.  Chances are pretty remote that you'll run over a reference to Bultmann or Tillich.

So why would a skeptic bother to swot up on the works of such rarified and justifiably obscure writers as Gunton, Torrance and company, when Christians themselves either can't be bothered, or, if they're not easily intimidated, find their work debatable and dubious? Reformed apologists are particularly obnoxious when it comes to trotting out their preferred authorities, invariably fellow-travellers in the Reformed tradition (J.I. Packer anyone?) that have near zero credibility outside that particular communion. These braying apologists would, I'm sure, love to provide the critics with a compulsory reading list - one that no one outside the ivory towers of their seminaries cares a whit for.  They would have a hard time giving away those books at the local Christian bookshop.  There it's all Joyce Meyer, Joseph Prince and Joel Osteen.

No wonder then that the skeptics focus their aim at the forms of Christianity that they see out in the real world rather dive down intellectual rat holes.  Not that coming to grips with some of these thinkers isn't potentially rewarding.  But let's be honest, when it comes to a choice between Eberhard Jüngel and Franklin Graham, crotchety old Franklin will win hands down every time (and frankly, if you've ever tried to read Jüngel, you'll understand why.)

And while that happens, you can hardly blame Christianity's critics for directing their firepower in the direction where all the fuss is.