Nonsense for the rest of us
Benozzo Gozzoli, The Glory of Saint Thomas Aquinas. 1468-1484. Source: Wikimedia Commons. The speech bubble is of 21st-century provenance
One of the pillars of the “New Atheism” (there’s nothing new about it) is that theology is a naked emperor. That is, theology is nonsense, through and through. And theologians, even really smart ones, are fundamentally delusional “faith-heads” (Richard Dawkins‘s term). This claim has the virtue of being logically consistent with their basic premise: God is a delusion.
This claim has another virtue: In its way, it is true. Theology, in very particular kind of way, is nonsense. But here’s a twist: real theologians know it. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Thomas Aquinas. He wrote feverishly for decades, and, building on Augustine, laid the intellectual foundation for centuries of Christian theologians. Thomas’s influence continues; his Summa Theologica is still required reading in seminaries and religion departments around the world. But he had a religious experience on 6 December 1273 and never again picked up a pen. After this event he could only say, “all that I have written is straw.” Thomas’s encounter with the divine, like that of Jacob, left him wounded. He had discovered the terrible truth: Next to God, all he had ever thought important was worthless. So here Thomas falls in line with the modern-day New Atheists. They agree that he did little more than babble.
Of course, their agreement on the value of theology is accidental. It does not stem from more fundamental agreements and might have been otherwise. While Dawkins et al. disrespect theology in light of the “greater truth” of science, Thomas disrespected it in light of the greater truth of God. I think that Thomas was justified in his opinion. What’s more, the atheist-scientists are justified in their own way. As a seminary student and ex-scientist I have been struck time and time again with the sensation that theology is a frustratingly slippery enterprise. Good experiments and careful observation constrain scientific theories, giving them a kind of substance and texture and reality I have not encountered in the large majority of theology I’ve read. Often, when I write papers about theology — on atonement, salvation, justification, sanctification, even creation — I get the distinct feeling that I’m playing a kind of game and not talking about the world as it really is. So I sympathize in part with the latest wave of atheists. Next to science, a lot of theology seems weak and unconvincing, disconnected from the world of facts.
Poor theology! So much disrespect! Why do we even do it?
I have two answers for this. First, we do it because we can’t not do it. It’s like wondering what’s out there beyond our little planet. It just can’t be helped. People will wonder and think and propose and argue about it, and there is nothing for it but to watch it happen. Of course theology as we know it may come to an end and astronomy as we know it may come to an end, but we human beings will keep right on asking the fundamental questions. This says nothing about the virtues of theology or astronomy; human beings will probably go on killing each other out of anger and fear for millenia but that doesn’t mean we should just kick back and watch the show. Which leads me to my second point: Theology may be madness but the best of it points like a sign, if only weakly, to something real.
The New Atheists deny the signified and see only the sign. And nothing is more nonsensical that a sign without a referent. Thomas beheld the signified and the sign lost its reason for existing. And nothing is more nonsensical than a sign without purpose. Theology is for those of us in the middle, for those who still need its signs, who have had glimpses perhaps but who have not yet beheld the signified, who travel in the hope of finally seeing the world as it really is.
