“Christianity…is a perpetual breeding ground for violence, abuse, superstition, war, discrimination, tyranny, and pride. Religion and spirituality is a bottomless pit breeding illusion, deceit, and oppression.”
Post your guess below. The answer appears after the jump (no peeking before you guess!).
Answer: Eugene Peterson, author of The Message translation of the Bible.
No, not Richard Dawkins. Not Sam Harris. Not even John Shelby Spong. Rather, one of the most widely read and respected Christian authors of our day.
The quote appears in a stunning essay about Abraham and the Akedah (ie, the story of the binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac, which appears in Genesis 22), which is chapter 2 in Peterson’s The Jesus Way. Like Soren Kierkegaard, Erich Auerbach, and countless others, Peterson finds in the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son a description of raw faith. It’s a terrifying story, one that makes us question many of our assumptions about God. As Peterson puts it:
How can God, whom our parents and pastors have taught us loves us from eternity, command this cold-blooded cruelty? How can God, whom Jesus tell us has such a tender heart that he is moved even by the death of sparrows, command a father to kill his son, without so much as a hint of explanation?
In the end, Peterson sees God’s command to Abraham to slay Isaac as the ultimate test, the ultimate request for sacrifice. And “sacrifice is to faith what eating is to nutrition. …Faith, of which Abraham is our father, can never be understood by means of explanation or definition, only in the practice of sacrifice.” Of course, God offers a way out for Abraham, just as Paul said God would do for us (1 Cor. 10:13).
Peterson’s summary critique of Christianity as a breeding ground for violence and pride is not a snarky or abject dismissal of a faith tradition; it’s a brutal acknowledgement of the way that God must see his own people. It’s an admission of the reality that Christian witness has far too often been a product of human weakness and selfishness, rather than a product of lives well lived after the selfless example of Christ. If we are to be free of such selfishness, our faith, says Peterson, needs testing. Heart-wrenching tests can reveal what’s lacking, and remove what’s false. And as horrified as we might be at what God asks, given who we are, who are we to say we do not need the test?
Peterson has been developing a marked straightforwardness in his latter days. The Jesus Way is part of a series of books on spiritual theology, preceded by Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places and Eat This Book, which constitute some of the most challenging and faith-shaping reading I’ve done in recent years. Amazing stuff, highly recommended.
posted December 17, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Patton,
I’m excited any time the story of Abraham and Isaac is mentioned–for me, and thanks to Kierkegaard, it has always presented the toughest nut to crack when it comes to the meaning of faith.
You mention the “countless others” who’ve wondered about the story. Let me add a specific, if perhaps unexpected, one: Jacques Derrida. He deals with the story, and Kierkegaard, in “The Gift of Death.” Here, for me, is the heart of Derrida’s concern, something I find profoundly human from a philosopher too often accused of unnecessary abstraction:
“[Abraham] would not be able to opt for fidelity to his own, or to his son, unless he were to betray the absolute other: God, if you wish. Let us not look for examples, there would be too many of them, at every step we took. By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention, by preferring my activity as a citizen or as a professorial and professional philosopher, writing and speaking here in a public language, French in my case, I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness. I betray my fidelity or my obligations to other citizens, to those who don’t speak my language and to whom I neither speak nor respond, to each of those who listen or read, and to whom I neither respond nor address myself in the proper manner, that is, in a singular manner (this for the so-called public space to which I sacrifice my so-called private space), thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family, my sons, each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other, every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day.”
Every act is a sacrifice, and a betrayal.
Sorry this was so long.
Martyn