Glen has a few thoughts on Dawkins.
I read Oswald Bayer last night and he made the rather provocative statement that:
"The question about justification is more important than the question about the existence of God."
(pp. 138f, Martin Luther's Theology)
Put that in your theological pipe and smoke it... as Don Carson might say.
I'm not sure I 100% understand him, but an earlier comment throws some light:
"certainty comes to exist in a concrete way. It takes place through the use of certain performative statements of Christian proclamation of the type used in the promise of the forgiveness of sins. Nothing can be abstracted from this concrete activity to concoct a statement that supposedly has general applicability, that would provide a place of refuge in a phenomenological, religious sense, that would have some overarching validity wherein all religions could find commonality. For Luther it follows that atheism is the high point among religions, which is most clearly seen in the religion of self-actualization, in which the human being seeks to make himself reliant simply on himself. [footnote: "Luther emphasizes this in a clearly blunt manner when he puts the Muslims on the same level with the papacy and the Enthusiasts. He does not distinguish between religions and confessions, but only between true and false faith. Everyone who attempts to justify himself apart from Christ is caught up in unbelief, no matter what form it takes."]"
(p.137, ibid)
I can see what he's getting at, I think. The way I see it, if there is a true god worthy of the name God, then justification must be necessary and must necessarily come from him, otherwise God wouldn't be god.
ReplyDeleteConversely, anyone who wants to justify himself is saying that, to all intents and purposes, there is no god worthy of the name. Not that I'd accuse a Muslim of being a practical atheist, but…
That's a good explanation for something I noticed recently here: A Christian (who it seems never understood the gospel) becomes an atheist to get the judge in the sky off his back while Bunyan (who also didn't understand the gospel) suddenly did and also found freedom from the Eye-in-the-Sky. Both are converted (one to atheism and one to true belief) and justification was at the heart of both.
ReplyDeleteWhat the atheist needed was not a theistic proof but justification.
I'm sure there's lots of other ramifications to Luther's and Bayer's insights, but that was something that struck me anyway.
Yes, and yes. Helpful comments.
ReplyDeleteDon't have much more to add at this stage :)