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SPIRITUALITY - Artificial Light
By Rev. Ron Rolheiser
What’s the use of an
old-fashioned, handheld lantern? Well, its
light can be quite useful
when it’s pitch-dark,
but it becomes superfluous and unnoticeable in the noonday
sun. Still, this doesn’t mean its light is
bad, only that it’s weak.
If we hold that image in our minds,
we will see both a huge irony and a profound lesson in the Gospels when they
describe the arrest of Jesus. Gospel of
John, for example, describes his arrest
this way: “Judas brought the cohort to
this place together with guards sent by
the chief priests and Pharisees, all carrying lanterns and torches.” John wants
us to see the irony in this, that is, the
forces of this world have come to arrest
and put on trial, Jesus, the Light of the
world, carrying weak, artificial light,
a lantern in the face of the Light of the
world, puny light in the full face of the
noonday sun. As well, in naming this
irony, the Gospels are offering a second
lesson: when we no longer walk in the
light of Christ, we will invariably turn
to artificial light.
This image, I believe, can serve as
a penetrating metaphor for how the
criticism that the Enlightenment has
made of our Christian belief in God
stands before what it is criticizing. That
criticism has two prongs.
The first prong is this: The Enlightenment (Modernist Thought) submits
that the God that is generally presented
by our Christian churches has no credibility because that God is simply a projection of human desire, a god made in
our own image and likeness, and a god
that we can forever manipulate to serve
self-interest. Belief in such a god, they
say, is adolescent in that it is predicated
on a certain naiveté, on an intellectual
blindness that can be flushed out and
remedied by a hard look at reality. An
enlightened mind, it is asserted, sees
belief in God as self-interest and as
intellectual blindness.
There is much to be said, positively,
for this criticism, given that much,
much of atheism is a parasite off of bad
theism. Atheism feeds off bad religion
and, no doubt, many of the things we
do in the name of religion are done out
of self-interest and intellectual blindness. How many times, for instance,
has politics used religion for its own
ends? The first prong of the criticism
that the Enlightenment makes of Christian belief is a healthy challenge to us
as believers.
But it’s the second prong of this
criticism that, I believe, stands like
a lantern, a weak light, dwarfed in
the noonday sun. Central to the Enlightenment’s criticism of belief in
God is their assertion (perhaps better
called prejudice) that faith is a naiveté,
something like belief in Santa and the
May 26, 2015
Easter Bunny, that we outgrow as we
mature and open our minds more and
more to knowledge and what’s empirically evident in the world. What we see
through science and honest observation, they believe, eventually puts to
death our belief in God, exposing it as
a naiveté. In essence, the assertion is
that if you face up to the hard empirical
facts of reality without blinking, with
honesty and courage, you will cease
to believe in God. Indeed, the very
phrase “the Enlightenment” implies
this. It’s only the unenlightened, premodernist mind that still can believe
in God. Moving beyond belief in God
is enlightenment.
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people to protect themselves against
certain inconvenient truths within
scientific and secular knowledge. In
doing this, we, in fact, concede that the
criticism made against us is true and,
worse still, we betray that fact that we
do not think that the truth of Christ
will stand up to the world.
But, given the penetrating metaphor
highlighted in Jesus’ arrest, there’s another way of seeing this: After we have
conceded the truth of the legitimate
findings of science and secular wisdom
and affirmed that they need to be embraced and not defended against, then,
in the light of John’s metaphor (worldly
forces, carrying lanterns and torches, as
Lanterns and torches are helpful when the sun is down, but they’re
utterly eclipsed by the light of the sun. Worldly knowledge too is helpful
in its own way, but it is more-than dwarfed by the light of the Son.
Sadly, Christianity has often internalized this prejudice and expressed
it (and continues to express it) in the
many forms of fear and anti-intellectualism within our churches. Too
often we unwittingly agree with our
critics that faith is a naiveté. We do it
by believing the very thing our critics
assert, namely, that if we studied and
looked at things hard enough we would
eventually lose our faith. We betray this
in our fear of the intellectual academy,
in our paranoia about secular wisdom,
in some of our fears about scientific
knowledge, and by forever warning
they to arrest the Light of world to put
it on trial), we should also see how dim
are the lights of our world, not least, the
criticism of the Enlightenment.
Lanterns and torches are helpful
when the sun is down, but they’re utterly eclipsed by the light of the sun.
Worldly knowledge too is helpful in its
own way, but it is more-than dwarfed
by the light of the Son.
Oblate Fath