Christian atheism is a theological position in which the belief in the God of Christianity
is rejected or absent but the moral teachings of Jesus are followed.
Christian atheism is related to Jesuism, the Christian theological-philosophical movement
named for its understanding of Jesus as a simple teacher of morals, in direct contrast
to traditional Christianity, which claims that Jesus is divine.
Beliefs Thomas Ogletree, Frederick Marquand Professor
of Ethics and Religious Studies at Yale Divinity School, lists these four common beliefs:
The assertion of the unreality of God for our age, including the understandings of God
which have been a part of traditional Christian theology
The insistence upon coming to grips with contemporary culture as a necessary feature of responsible
theological work Varying degrees and forms of alienation from
the church as it is now constituted Recognition of the centrality of the person
of Jesus in theological reflection God's existence
According to Paul van Buren, a Death of God theologian, the word God itself is "either
meaningless or misleading". He contends that it is impossible to think about God. Van Buren
says that
"we cannot identify anything which will count for or against the truth of our statements
concerning 'God'".
The inference from these claims to the "either meaningless or misleading" conclusion is implicitly
premised on the verificationist theory of meaning. Most Christian atheists believe that
God never existed, but there are a few who believe in the death of God literally. Thomas
J. J. Altizer is a well-known Christian atheist who is known for his literal approach to the
death of God. He often speaks of God's death as a redemptive event. In his book The Gospel
of Christian Atheism he speaks of how
"every man today who is open to experience knows that God is absent, but only the Christian
knows that God is dead, that the death of God is a final and irrevocable event, and
that God's death has actualized in our history a new and liberated humanity".
Dealing with culture Theologians including Altizer and Lyas looked
at the scientific, empirical culture of today and tried to find religion's place in it.
In Altizer's words,
"No longer can faith and the world exist in mutual isolation…the radical Christian condemns
all forms of faith that are disengaged with the world."
He goes on to say that our response to atheism should be one of "acceptance and affirmation".
Colin Lyas, a Philosophy lecturer at Lancaster University, stated that
"Christian atheists are united also in the belief that any satisfactory answer to these
problems must be an answer that will make life tolerable in this world, here and now
and which will direct attention to the social and other problems of this life."
Separation from the church Altizer has said that
"the radical Christian... believes that the ecclesiastical tradition has ceased to be
Christian".
He believed that orthodox Christianity no longer had any meaning to people because it
did not discuss Christianity within the context of contemporary theology. Christian atheists
want to be completely separated from most orthodox Christian beliefs and biblical traditions.
Altizer states that a faith will not be completely pure if it is open to modern culture. This
faith "can never identify itself with an ecclesiastical tradition or with a given doctrinal or ritual
form." He goes on to say that faith cannot "have any final assurance as to what it means
to be a Christian". Altizer said, "We must not, he says, seek for the sacred by saying
'no' to the radical profanity of our age, but by saying 'yes' to it". They see religions
which withdraw from the world as moving away from truth. This is part of the reason why
they see the existence of God as counter-progressive. Altizer wrote of God as the enemy to man because
mankind could never reach its fullest potential while God existed. He went on to state that
"to cling to the Christian God in our time is to evade the human situation of our century
and to renounce the inevitable suffering which is its lot".
The centrality of Jesus
Jesus, although not seen as divine, is still a central feature of Christian atheism. Most
Christian atheists think of Jesus as a wise and good man, accepting his moral teachings
but rejecting the idea of his divinity. Hamilton said that to the Christian atheist, Jesus
is not really the foundation of faith; instead he is a "place to be, a standpoint". Christian
atheists look to Jesus as an example of what a Christian should be, but they do not see
him as God. Hamilton wrote that following Jesus means
being "alongside the neighbor, being for him", and that to follow Jesus means to be human,
to help other humans, and to further humankind. By denomination
Protestantism In the Netherlands, 42% of the members of
the Protestant Church in the Netherlands are nontheists. Furthermore, in the PKN and several
other smaller denominations of the Netherlands, 1 in 6 clergy are either agnostic or atheist.
A minister of the PKN, Klaas Hendrikse has described God as "a word for experience, or
human experience" and said that Jesus may have never existed.
Roman Catholic Catholic atheism is a belief in which the
culture, traditions, rituals, and norms of Catholicism are accepted, but the existence
of God is rejected. It is illustrated in Miguel de Unamuno's novel San Manuel Bueno, Mártir.
According to research in 2007, only 27% of Catholics in the Netherlands considered themselves
theist, while 55% were ietsist or nontheist, and 17% were agnostic. Many Dutch people still
affiliate with the term "Catholic", and use it within certain traditions as a basis of
their cultural identity, rather than as a religious identity. The vast majority of the
Catholic population in the Netherlands is now largely irreligious in practice.
Criticisms In his book Mere Christianity, the apologist
C. S. Lewis objects to the Christian Atheist's claim that Jesus was merely a moral teacher:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often
say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept
his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man
and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either
be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would
be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God,
or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him
and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let
us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He
has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He
was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely
it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."
Lewis's argument, now known as Lewis's Trilemma, has been criticized for, among other things,
constituting a false trilemma. As philosopher John Beversluis argues, Lewis "deprives his
readers of numerous alternate interpretations of Jesus that carry with them no such odious
implications." See also
References
Further reading Soury, M. Joles. Un athée catholique. E.
Vitte. ASIN B001BQPY7G. Altizer, Thomas J. J.. The New Gospel of Christian
Atheism. The Davies Group. ISBN 1-888570-65-2. Hamilton, William, A Quest for the Post-Historical
Jesus,. ISBN 978-0-8264-0641-5 External links
Atheists for Jesus