By claiming that evangelical atheism "mirrors the faith it rejects" Gray certainly means to provoke and he has succeeded in inciting me to explain that there is a substantial difference between promoting beliefs that harm others and yet have no sound evidence to support them and believing things that aid human progress and do have sound evidence in their support.  The burden of proof is always greater on the one who would endanger another's well-being in the pursuit of a righteous goal.  One does not have an absolute right to be wrong when one is risking more than one's own safety on the basis of a mere belief.

Gray's argument that the theme of free will against faith in Phillip Pullman's novel-turned-blockbuster movie The Golden Compass is indebted to (Anglican) Christianity seems to be quite a stretch. Equally dubious is Gray's claim that viewing the exercise of free will as part of being human is a "legacy of faith". Any theologian worth his salt knows that free will and human moral agency were very deliberately and painstakingly extirpated from Orthodox Christian doctrine by means of councils and purges involving the excommunication of its proponents.

We need only observe the incidents between Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorians, to see how much political energy was spent on expunging human agency from Christianity. According to the renowned historian Henry Chadwick, Cyril "had begun his episcopate with a series of violent incidents," one of which led to riots between Christians and Jews in Alexandria.    Cyril was deeply opposed to Theodore, who had been appointed bishop of Mopsuestia in 392. Theodore believed that the miraculous power ascribed to Jesus was not to be taken in its literal sense, but referred instead to Jesus' perfection of his human potential.  Theodore concluded that the redemption of humanity results from the individual human will, and not from the power of God's saving grace.  He rejected the prioritisation of God's Being over Jesus' humanity because it made Jesus's humanity only a passive participant in human redemption. Theodore was adamant that the true humanity of Jesus hinged on his autonomy - and insisted that the cause of his redemptive acts was his human freedom. Theodore's theology was a profound challenge to the main Alexandrian tradition.  

Cyril, an ardent defender of that tradition, first opposed Theodore indirectly, by attacking anyone who regarded Christ as just a supreme example of human inspiration. Theodore was not the originator of this view.  He was following in the footsteps of a long tradition of dissent that centred on the person of Christ, the interpretation of scripture, and the related question of human free will. Diodore of Antioch (appointed bishop of Tarsus in 378) had taught that authentic theology depended upon the spontaneity of the humanity of Christ, who was the supreme example of human faith.  Diodore had interpreted the incarnation as no more than a way of talking about a supreme instance of human inspiration.  This doctrine brought him into conflict with Apollinaris of Laodicea, in what was one of a long succession of debates of this kind.

Eventually Cyril enlisted the support of Rome in his crusade against Nestorious. Rome forwarded a formal letter to Nestorious, demanding recantatation within ten days.  It reached Nestorious accompanied by Cyril's Twelve Anathemas. The latter were intended to condemn the Antiochene Christology once and for all.  Nestorious stood accused (probably correctly) of teaching that Christ was merely an inspired man.  If he did not proclaim any such thing directly, his theology certainly implied it by placing the redemptive emphasis on the side of humanity.  Cyril and his supporters excommunicated Nestorious at the council of Ephesus in 431.  

It was through proceedings such as this that the Church eventually adopted the Alexandrian view that Jesus was not a human person but a divine person who assumed a complete human nature without assuming human personhood. In order to understand what exactly the Alexandrian school claimed, it is helpful to know that the Logos refers to the subjective animus, or the wilful aspect of a person.  It was of the utmost theological importance to the Alexandrians that Jesus's human will not be conceived as acting independently of the Godhead. While the Alexandrians maintained that the Lord enjoyed a state of impossibility of sin, the Antiochenes argued that Jesus had at all points actualised the possibility of not sinning.  In other words, he did something humanly possible.

A similar conflict featured Pelagius and Augustine.  Pelagius was a British monk who arrived in Rome around 380.  He later moved to Palestine, which became his home until 418.  The doctrine of Pelagius rested on freedom of the will.  For Pelagius, human nature is neither inclined towards good or evil, but is free and hence equally prepared to do either.  If the human will were predisposed to do evil, then there would be no sense in holding individuals personally accountable for their wrongdoing. In other words, the merit for human beings' actions lies totally with their own personal responsibility.  From these presuppositions Pelagius arrived at the conclusion that Adam was responsible for his own sin, but had not transferred it vicariously to the whole race.  There could be no sense in God punishing the human race for Adam's sin.  Furthermore, the Redemption does not give new life to the human race.  What Christ gave to the race was simply a very good example.

Pelagius argued that you work your salvation through your own efforts and the exercise of free will, while Augustine maintained that it was only through the grace of God that anyone could live a just and moral life. Each interpreted Pauline texts as supporting their respective views --- determinism and free will, divine grace and personal responsibility.  Pelagius was at pains to square Paul's letters with logic: if Adam's sin injured everyone, even those who were not sinners, then Christ's righteousness ought to save even those who were not believers.  The thrust of Pelagianism consisted in his attempts to rescue Paul's letters from their own implicit determinism.  Pelagius apparently thought there was more to be gained from forcing a difficult interpretation of Paul than there was in criticising him.  In his Commentary on the Pauline Letters, Pelagius repeatedly interpreted them to exclude any hint of divine determinism. Pelagius was an anthropological optimist who taught that humans have a natural capacity to reject evil and seek God, that Christ's admonition `Be ye perfect' presupposes this capacity, and that grace is our God-given natural ability to seek and to serve God. In other words, God made us absolutely free.  In a letter to Demetrias he writes:

    "Instead of thinking it a great privilege to be given commands
     by such an illustrious power . . . we talk back to God in a
     scornful and slothful way.  We say, `This is too hard and
     difficult; we can't do it.  We are only human, and we suffer
     from weakness of the flesh.'  Blind stupidity!  Arrogant
     blasphemy!  we ascribe to the Lord of knowledge the guilt of a
     twofold ignorance: that he is ignorant of what he created, and
     of what he commanded.  We imply that God the Creator forgot  
     human weakness and put on us demands that we cannot
     bear."

Pelagius was at heart a humanist, and felt that his philanthropy was consistent with the Christian scriptures.  He was only half right.  By reading the gospels through the theological lenses of Pauline doctrine, he ended up demoting the philanthropic half of Christian scripture in relation to a theology that thoroughly undermined it.  

Because he was not prepared to criticise the Pauline scriptures, Pelagius had to confront Augustine's much more authentic account of Pauline theology.  Had he instead made the gospels absolute, and demoted the Pauline doctrine by reading it through the implicit humanism of the gospels, he might have attacked the Pauline message itself, rather than attempting to stretch it to fit his anthropology.  

Augustine, like Paul, was beset by a profound guilt, and the anthropological pessimism of Paul's epistles easily reinforced his theology.  When pressed by another opponent, Julian of Eclanum, to give a precise account of where sin comes from, Augustine's appeal was to Paul's doctrine of original sin.  Augustine adverted to Romans 5 for scriptural support.  In addition, church practice confirmed what was there written.  Augustine reasoned that if Christ had died for infants as well as for adults, then they must be held guilty.  To Julian's question, "How are [infants] guilty?" Augustine replied, "How are they not guilty, since Christ died for them?"    This argument seemed to work backwards from a conclusion contained in the premise.  As Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard noted in a Journal entry centuries later, "Dogmatics does not prove hereditary sin, but explains it by presupposing it."  

Beginning in 425 Augustine led a campaign against another group of ascetic monks (dubbed `Semi-Pelagians' by later theologians).  These monks were offended by the implications of Augustine's doctrine of grace, which they saw as diminishing the importance of human effort. The argument centred on the origin of faith in the soul, or the initium fidei. Was it caused by grace or by an act of human free will? In this debate Augustine reiterated his interpretation of the Pauline message. The primacy he gave to grace came from the Epistles to the Galatians and Romans (see Confessions 8).  

Augustine wrote four tracts against Julian, and was still composing the last of these when he died in 430.  Pelagianism was condemned as a heresy at the council of Ephesus in 431, not long after Cyril and his Western allies had excommunicated Nestorius.  Augustine remains a pillar of the Christian church.  His doctrines and writings are taught in theological institutions to this day.  Pelagius has been relegated to the margins of unorthodox obscurity.  

By no means was Ephesus the end of the quarrels over doctrine that typified the early Church. The Reformation was to be an equally formidable opponent to any humanistic understanding of the Christian faith. For Luther, as for Calvin, the core of theology becomes not human agency in its potential goodness, nor the discoveries of human intellect, but the dogma of scripture.  The break with humanism is completed in Luther's work On the Enslaved Will.  According to Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, "The cautious defense of human freedom by Erasmus, his support of the autonomy of the will, which was not completely forfeited by the fall, seem to Luther to be nothing less than an unmasked expression of religious scepticism.  There is no more dangerous error than belief in any such independence of man. . ."    Luther insisted that true knowledge of God came from distinguishing between God's power and ours,

     "For as long as man is convinced that that he can do
      something for his own salvation, he retains his self-
      confidence and does not completely despair; for this
      reason he does not humble himself before God, but
      asserts himself, or at least hopes and wishes for
      opportunity, time, and work in order finally to obtain his
      salvation.

       But he who never doubts that all depends on the will
       of God, despairs completely of helping himself, does  not
       choose us, but awaits an act of God; he is nearest to Grace
       and salvation."

For Luther salvation depends not only on distinguishing between God's power and ours, but also on despairing of ours completely.  Once again, Paul's Epistles provided the scriptural bedrock for this view.  In Luther's theology we have a summary of the Reformation verdict on humanism.  Its misanthropy dominated the seventeenth century despite futile attempts to contest it.

Yet according to Gray, we need only reflect on the Genesis story to see that liberal notions of personal autonomy are biblical in origin.   Now this really IS absurd. The Pauline Christian doctrine of the Atonement places an ethical demand on humans while assuring them that the demand is humanly impossible to realize.  The doctrine says exactly what armchair Christians want to hear. It tells them that it's perfectly acceptable, even morally virtuous, to worship Jesus rather than to imitate him.  It tells them they need not worry about their failure to `live up to' or `act out' the kind of human life Jesus lived because it is not humanly possible to do so. We don't have to bear the consciousness of our failure to live up to the kind of ethical life Jesus proved to be humanly possible, because Jesus is not human after all - he's `God'.  If Jesus is not like us then we cannot be like him. We can relax and enjoy our complacent imperfection without having to worry that someone like Jesus might show up and embarrass us.  

According to the doctrine of vicarious salvation, `sin' is not the failure to do something that is humanly possible; it is our inherent (`original') lack of potential to lead morally virtuous lives. Because the moral life is not humanly possible, Jesus -- a divine being -- had to come down to earth to do it for us (i.e. instead of us).  Our only hope of becoming virtuous is to give our assent to this proposition and our obedience to a set of rules defined by a sexist male hierarchy. In other words, we have to `act' good even if our inner disposition is rotten to the core.

In addition to being told that it is not possible to live a life like Jesus', we are also told that the very suggestion that the gospels contain any such demand is blasphemous -- a most vile display of hubris, the `mere humanism' of pagan society.  All of this nonsense comes from the Pauline interpretation of Genesis as a transgression by humanity (in the abstract) against God.  But if the reason disobedience to God is `sinful' is down to a wrong choice, then it makes no sense to say that the entire species is damned for the choices of two individuals. Certainly the individuals must take responsibility.  Instead, Paul's doctrine of `original sin' says that somehow the sin of one party `transfers' (presumably by heredity) to each and every one of us, -- before we exercise our own free will.  Yet this makes nonsense of freedom and responsibility.  

For Paul, whose doctrines overshadow the gospels as the true litmus test for Christian orthodoxy, obedience is the key to human fulfilment in "Christ". This is the only kind of human fulfilment Paul acknowledges. The result is not individual liberty (with its accompanying individual responsibility) but an 'emptying' of the self and submission to God's theocratic representatives on earth:

"Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, those who resist the authorities resist what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.   [Rom. 13:1-3]  

Anything but this kind of submissive obedience results in judgement, punishment, and ultimately, death.  

"Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have becomes slaves of righteousness."
                                [Rom. 6: 16-18]  

According to Paul's Christian worldview, freedom is always freedom from 'sin.'  But since sin is the controlling aspect of human nature (residing in our members and making us captive to their passions) only a total rejection of ourselves can lead to true freedom.  'Freedom' is thus inextricably linked to an exterior power upon which we are dependent and to which we are obedient, like slaves.  Only through submission to this authority can we hope to be 'free' from judgement, punishment, and mortality. So 'freedom' is a euphemism for total obedience, or slavery. Paul's version of freedom is conceived politically as freedom from the dread of punishment and death; both result from disobedience.

In light of the long history of religious intolerance for free will and personal responsibility, Gray ought to understand why the liberal tradition of prizing free will over religious obedience has come to be associated with what he labels "zealous atheism".   In yet another inversion of history, Gray claims that atheism is a "project of universal conversion" that springs from the belief that "one way of living is right for everybody."  He argues, as though any liberal atheist had ever objected, that it is entirely reasonable to have no religious beliefs and yet be friendly to religion.  This is nothing but a straw man that he sets up to misrepresent secular humanists or atheists as intolerant of religion, which is something they have never been.

John Stewart Mill, the father of liberalism, favoured tolerance of unconventional things and freedom of expression over censorship because those who suppress opinion are not infallible yet they are deciding for others.  To deny others the opportunity of judging amounts to an assumption of infallibility. Government suppression cannot be justified even in the case of apparently dangerous or unpopular opinion.  Today's `fanatics' may later be seen to have been legitimate dissidents with a morally superior message of social reform. Liberty of discussion and debate is the very thing that allows us to assume the truth of our current convictions for practical purposes of action.  Even mistaken views can contain elements of truth, so they too should be discussed openly. A society's accepted wisdom needs to be subjected to questioning in order to maintain its legitimacy.  

Liberals have traditionally preferred the right over the good.  That is, the state must remain morally neutral between different moral 'worldviews'. The state establishes and safeguards the conditions in which people can pursue the good life as each defines it, rather than proscribing or promoting any particular definition of what is good.  The American Constitution, for example, favours self-determination because its authors recognized that, where there is no freedom, nor can there be virtue. It was precisely because they wanted human beings to be free to fulfil the human need to live morally good lives that our nation's founders protected individual conscience from the tyranny of theocratic rule.

Responsibility means more than obedience to external authorities.  A definition of 'goodness' based on social conformity to conventional rules is not genuinely 'moral' if it is motivated fear or self-preservation.  To be responsible is not just to do my duty because I know I will be punished if I do not. On that definition a 'responsible' person would do any crime he thought he could 'get away' with.  Responsibility means knowing that I will deserve punishment if I fail to do my duty, whether I am in fact punished or not. People do not feel a sense of moral duty to obey immoral laws, nor should they. To be responsible means that I have a duty to disobey immoral laws even though I may risk unjust punishment for my disobedience. Jesus is particularly exemplary in this regard. To take responsibility is to confront my own freedom and the anguish that comes with difficult choices, rather than pretending that I am not truly free, or disguising my freedom from myself.  Responsibility means to act according to reason and conscience and to try, to the best of our abilities, to hold our laws to that same standard -- to require that they conform to the good for humanity.  As Jesus said: "The Sabbath was made for mankind, not mankind for the Sabbath."  

To his credit, Gray admits that most religions do not consist of propositions struggling to become theories. "They answer to a need for meaning that is met by myth rather than explanation."   As Tertullian (c. 160 - 220), an early church Father, famously said:  Credo quia absurdum  ( "I believe because it is absurd." ).

On the other hand, the one (rather significant) exception to this is Christianity, which, under Greek influences, has tried to turn religion into an explanatory theory. Gray's own observation that the US is no more secular today than in was 150 years ago ought to be sufficient to show that much of today's religion is concerned with treating myths of faith as though they were theories.  In the most powerful country in the world there has been a persistent effort to put `intelligent design' back into the public school curriculum, and to put a `Biblical worldview' into the courts.  Yet oddly, Gray's concern is with "secular myths and pseudo-science" rather than with the rise of Christian nationalism and Christian "pseudo-science" in the United States.  

Gray goes on to fallaciously assert that secular theories of progress, because they share with Christianity a teleological perspective on human history, must be indebted to Christianity for that too.  Gray says that we cannot expect the growth of knowledge to coincide with a growth in political and ethical improvement, as some scientific `secular missionaries' do.  Here, here.  But Gray thinks that belief in progress is somehow a uniquely Christian outlook and that somehow any belief in it must be `owing' to Christian origins.  Nonsense!

Gray correctly points out that Nietzsche was no less a critic of secular liberalism than of Christianity and saw the former as an outgrowth of the latter.  Perhaps it is time we join Gray in asking whether Christianity really has nurtured the liberal values that atheists defend or whether it has been a hindrance.  

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