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Christian atheism is an ideology that embraces the teachings, narratives, symbols, practices, or communities associated with Christianity without accepting the literal existence of God. It often overlaps with nontheism and post-theism.
There are different schools of thought among Christian atheists. Thomas Ogletree, Frederick Marquand Professor of Ethics and Religious Studies at Yale Divinity School, lists these four common beliefs: [1] [2]
Death of God theology, which had brief public prominence in the mid-1960s, refers to a range of views aiming to account for the rise of secularity and emphasizing that God has either ceased to exist or never did. According to Paul van Buren, a Death of God theologian, the word God itself is "either meaningless or misleading". [2] Van Buren contended that it is impossible to think about God and said, "We cannot identify anything which will count for or against the truth of our statements concerning 'God'." [2] Most Christian atheists believe that God never existed, but a few take the death of God literally. [3]
Thomas J. J. Altizer spoke of Jesus' death on the cross as a redemptive event that passed the baton to humanity. In The Gospel of Christian Atheism, he stated, "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." [4]
Some death of God theologians favor separation from the institutions of the Christian Church. Altizer stated that "the radical Christian believes that the ecclesiastical tradition has ceased to be Christian" and indeed that faith "can never identify itself with an ecclesiastical tradition or with a given doctrinal or ritual form." [4] Moreover, he believed orthodox Christianity failed in rejecting modern culture and contemporary theology, and that it should instead seek the sacred by embracing the radical profanity of the modern age. [5] Altizer saw God as the enemy of man because mankind could never reach its fullest potential while God existed – and to cling to God was "to evade the human situation of our century and to renounce the inevitable suffering which is its lot." [4]
Postmodern theology emphasizes that God, or the idea of God, is subject to human interpretation. It is influenced by deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida, the German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Christian existentialists including Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich, and philosopher Martin Heidegger.
John Caputo, a leading figure in postmodern theology, advocates "weak theology," which denies the existence of a supernatural, powerful God that reigns over the world in favor of a God that represents the call for people to embrace "unconditionals" such as justice, hospitality, and forgiveness. These unconditionals are never fully reachable or even conceivable. Accordingly, Caputo says, "God doesn't exist; God insists," and "the existence of our response is the only way the insistence of the call acquires existence or makes an appearance in the world." Caputo, who distances himself from death of God theology, asserts that atheism is the beginning of theology rather than the point of it, as he stresses the role of theopoetics in which people respond to the call of "God" through things such as metaphors, narratives, songs, poems, and parables rather than propositions and arguments. Caputo accepts the postmodern label but also uses the terms "radical theology," post-structuralism, and post-theism. He identifies with the Christian left. [6]
In the United Kingdom, Don Cupitt pioneered Christian non-realism, which rejects a "realistic ontology, the notion that there is something out there prior to and independent of our language and theories, and against which they can be checked." [7] Cupitt came to associate with postmodernism over time and advocates for "solar living" that says religion can offer a moral philosophy suited to our times, rooted in both cosmology and secular culture, and, like the sun, "simply is its own outpouring of self-expression." [8]
Philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek says, "The only way to be an atheist is through Christianity." He claims traditional atheism does not go far enough:
Christianity is much more atheist than the usual atheism, which can claim there is no God and so on, but nonetheless retains a certain trust into the Big Other. This Big Other can be called natural necessity, evolution, or whatever. We humans are nonetheless reduced to a position within the harmonious whole of evolution, whatever, but the difficult thing to accept is again that there is no Big Other, no point of reference which guarantees meaning.
According to Žižek, the idea of Jesus' death on the cross addresses this tension by serving as an act of love and a "resolution of radical anxiety." Indeed, Žižek says that Jesus himself became an atheist on the cross when crying out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34) [9]
Theologian Peter Rollins says the distinction between theology and atheism is "artificial," and he extols the "profoundly theological dimensions of atheism and the deeply atheistic dimensions of theology." [10] Rollins says that "when you take Christianity seriously," the belief in a metaphysical God "of necessity goes." [11] Rollins instead advocates pyrotheology:
Pyrotheology involves a deep critique of any religious/ideological system that promises an escape from doubt and anxiety. [...] Pyrotheology helps to transform the doubts and difficulties of daily life into a fuel that ignites a journey into the depth and density of life. Pyrotheology offers an incendiary understanding of faith that has nothing to do with the tired debates between theists and atheists. It uncovers how faith helps us resolutely confront our brokenness, joyfully embrace unknowing, and courageously face the difficulties of life. [12]
Theologians including Altizer and Colin Lyas, a philosophy lecturer at Lancaster University, have written about religion's place in a scientific, empirical culture. In Altizer's words, "[n]o longer can faith and the world exist in mutual isolation [...] the radical Christian condemns all forms of faith that are disengaged with the world." [4] He adds that mankind's response to atheism should be one of "acceptance and affirmation". [4] Lyas writes, "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." [3]
Although Jesus is still a central feature of Christian atheism, Hamilton said that to the Christian atheist, Jesus as a historical or supernatural figure is not the foundation of faith; instead, Jesus is a "place to be, a standpoint". [5] Some Christian atheists look to Jesus as an example of what a Christian should be, but they do not see him as God, nor as the Son of God; merely as an influential rabbi. Hamilton wrote that following Jesus means being "alongside the neighbor, being for him", [5] and that to follow Jesus means to be human, to help other humans, and to further humankind. Other Christian atheists such as Thomas Altizer preserve the divinity of Jesus, arguing that through him God negates God's transcendence of being.
Of Americans who do not believe in God, 5% identified as Catholic, while 9% identified as Protestant and other Christian, according to the 2007 Pew Religious Landscape survey. [13] Of Americans who identify as unaffiliated, including atheists and agnostics, 41% were raised Protestant and 28% were raised Catholic, according to the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape survey. [14] [15]
In the Netherlands, 42% of the members of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN) are nontheists. [16] Non-belief among clergymen is not always seen as a problem. Some follow the tradition of "Christian non-realism", most famously expounded in the United Kingdom by Don Cupitt in the 1980s, which holds that God is a symbol or metaphor and that religious language is not matched by a transcendent reality. According to an investigation of 860 pastors in seven Dutch Protestant denominations, 1 in 6 clergy are either agnostic or atheist. In one of those denominations, the Remonstrants, the number of doubters was 42%. [17] [18]
Klaas Hendrikse, a PKN minister, has called God "a word for experience, or human experience", and said that Jesus may not have existed. Hendrikse gained attention with his 2007 book Believing in a God Who Does Not Exist: Manifesto of An Atheist Pastor, in which he said that it was not necessary to believe in God's existence in order to believe in God. Hendrikse writes: "God is for me not a being but a word for what can happen between people. Someone says to you, for example, 'I will not abandon you', and then makes those words come true. It would be perfectly alright to call that [relationship] God". A General Synod found that clergy and church members widely shared Hendrikse's views. The 2010 decision to allow Hendrikse to continue working as a pastor followed the advice of a regional supervisory panel that Hendrikse's statements "are not of sufficient weight to damage the foundations of the Church. The ideas of Hendrikse are theologically not new, and are in keeping with the liberal tradition that is an integral part of our church", the panel concluded. [17]
A 2003 Harris Interactive survey found that 90% of self-identified Protestants in the United States believe in God and about 4% believe there is no God. [19] In 2017, the WIN-Gallup International Association (WIN/GIA) poll found that Sweden, a majority Christian country, had second highest percentage (76%) of people who call themselves atheist or irreligious, after China. [20] [21] A substantial portion of Quakers are nontheist Quakers. Among British Quakers, 14.5% identified as atheists and 43% felt "unable to profess belief in God" in 2013. [22]
Catholic atheists accept the culture, traditions, rituals and norms of Catholicism, but deny the existence of God. Miguel de Unamuno's 1930 novel San Manuel Bueno, Mártir depicts Catholic atheism. According to research in 2007, only 27% of Catholics in the Netherlands considered themselves theist; 55% were ietsist or agnostic deist and 17% were agnostic or atheist. 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 Dutch Catholic population is now largely irreligious in practice. [16]
In his book Mere Christianity , the apologist C. S. Lewis objected to Hamilton's version of Christian atheism and the claim that Jesus was merely a moral guide:
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 constituting a false dilemma, since it does not deal with other options such as Jesus being mistaken, misrepresented, or simply mythical. Philosopher John Beversluis argues that Lewis "deprives his readers of numerous alternate interpretations of Jesus that carry with them no such odious implications". [23] Bart Ehrman stated that it is a mere legend the historical Jesus called himself God; this would have been unknown to Lewis since he was never a professional Bible scholar. [24] [25]
Agnosticism is the view or belief that the existence of God, the divine, or the supernatural is either unknowable in principle or unknown in fact. It can also mean an apathy towards such religious belief and refer to personal limitations rather than a worldview. Another definition is the view that "human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist."
Nontheism or non-theism is a range of both religious and non-religious attitudes characterized by the absence of espoused belief in the existence of God or gods. Nontheism has generally been used to describe apathy or silence towards the subject of gods and differs from atheism, or active disbelief in any gods. It has been used as an umbrella term for summarizing various distinct and even mutually exclusive positions, such as agnosticism, ignosticism, ietsism, skepticism, pantheism, pandeism, transtheism, atheism, and apatheism. It is in use in the fields of Christian apologetics and general liberal theology.
Christian existentialism is a theo-philosophical movement which takes an existentialist approach to Christian theology. The school of thought is often traced back to the work of the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) who is widely regarded as the father of existentialism.
Liberal Christianity, also known as liberal theology and historically as Christian Modernism, is a movement that interprets Christian teaching by prioritizing modern knowledge, science and ethics. It emphasizes the importance of reason and experience over doctrinal authority. Liberal Christians view their theology as an alternative to both atheistic rationalism and theologies based on traditional interpretations of external authority, such as the Bible or sacred tradition.
Atheism is the rejection of an assertion that a deity exists. In a narrower sense, positive atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities, effectively taking the stance of a positive claim in regards to the existence of any goddess or god. The English term 'atheist' was used at least as early as the sixteenth century and atheistic ideas and their influence have a longer history.
The Sea of Faith Network is an organisation with the stated aim to explore and promote religious faith as a human creation.
Criticism of atheism is criticism of the concepts, validity, or impact of atheism, including associated political and social implications. Criticisms include positions based on the history of science, philosophical and logical criticisms, findings in both the natural and social sciences, theistic apologetic arguments, arguments pertaining to ethics and morality, the effects of atheism on the individual, or the assumptions that underpin atheism.
Peter Rollins is a Northern Irish writer, public speaker, philosopher, producer and theologian.
Some movements or sects within traditionally monotheistic or polytheistic religions recognize that it is possible to practice religious faith, spirituality and adherence to tenets without a belief in deities. People with what would be considered religious or spiritual belief in a supernatural controlling power are defined by some as adherents to a religion; the argument that atheism is a religion has been described as a contradiction in terms.
Death of God theology refers to a range of ideas by various theologians and philosophers that try to account for the rise of secularity and abandonment of traditional beliefs in God. They posit that God has either ceased to exist or in some way accounted for such a belief.
Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer was an American university professor, religious scholar, and theologian, noted for his incorporation of Death of God theology and Hegelian dialectical philosophy into his body of work. He regarded his philosophical theology as also being grounded in the works of William Blake and considered his theology to have come into its own with his extended study of Blake's radical visionary thinking: The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake (1967); indeed he regarded himself as the first and only fully Blakean theologian.
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which is the belief that at least one deity exists.
Postchristianity is the situation in which Christianity is no longer the dominant civil religion of a society but has gradually assumed values, culture, and worldviews that are not necessarily Christian. Post-Christian tends to refer to the loss of Christianity's monopoly in historically Christian societies to atheism or secularism. It does not include formerly Christian societies that now mostly follow other religions like Islam, such as parts of the Balkans and the Middle East.
"Is God Dead?" was an April 8, 1966, cover story for the news magazine Time. A previous article, from October 1965, had investigated a trend among 1960s theologians to write God out of the field of theology. The 1966 article looked in greater depth at the problems facing modern theologians, in making God relevant to an increasingly secular society. Modern science seemed to have had eliminated the need for religion to explain the natural world, and God took up less and less space in people's daily lives. The ideas of various scholars were brought in, including the application of contemporary philosophy to the field of theology, and a more personal, individual approach to religion.
The term New Atheism describes the positions of some atheist academics, writers, scientists, and philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries. New Atheism advocates the view that superstition, religion, and irrationalism should not be tolerated. Instead, they advocate the antitheist view that the various forms of theism should be criticised, countered, examined, and challenged by rational argument, especially when they exert strong influence on the broader society, such as in government, education, and politics. Critics have characterised New Atheism as "secular fundamentalism" or "fundamentalist atheism". Major figures of New Atheism include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett, collectively referred to as the "Four Horsemen" of the movement.
Articles related to philosophy of religion include:
Christian agnosticism is a theological position drawing influences from Christianity as well as agnosticism. Christian agnostics hold that it is difficult or impossible to be sure of anything beyond the basic tenets of the Christian faith. They believe that God or a higher power might exist, that Jesus may have a special relationship with God, might in some way be divine, and that God might perhaps be worshipped. This belief system has deep roots in the early days of the Church.
Klaas Hendrikse was a Dutch minister of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN) who was known as de atheïstische dominee.
McAfee: Are you religious? Do you support the Separation of Church and State? Spencer: I'm an atheist.
Martin: Are you a Christian? Spencer: I'm an cultural Christian.
Vosper herself is a bit heterodox on the question of Christ. Asked if she believes that Jesus was the son of God, she said, 'I don't think Jesus was. ' That is, she doesn't think He existed at all.
