Chatting with clerics
I can’t help noticing that clerics say odd things sometimes. I suppose it’s their job, but it surprises me anyway. I suppose it surprises me that they don’t try to cover up more.
The Bishop of Oxford (again), for instance. He said something very droll.
I am sure the Roman Catholic bishops are intelligent, rational people, but their starting point on embryo research is mistaken. They believe that the newly fertilised egg, the tiny bundle of multiplying cells smaller than a pin head, has the same right to life as an adult. But more than two-thirds of fertilised eggs are lost in nature anyway. If each of these really is a person, that is, an eternal soul, it would lead to the absurd conclusion that heaven is mainly populated by people who have never been born.
Ah yes, how absurd – but is it any more absurd than the conclusion that heaven exists and that it is mainly populated by people who have been born? Not a lot. The whole idea of a heaven populated by dead people is absurd, yet here is this grown man treating it as a matter of fact.
The other day Gene Robinson, the gay bishop of New Hampshire (the one who has made life so difficult for the archbishop and his friends) was on Fresh Air. Terri Gross asked for his views on abortion, and he gave a both-and reply, the first part of which was that ‘all life is sacred’ and the second of which is that it’s for the woman to decide. It’s odd that churchy people keep saying that, and that no one takes them up for it. They don’t believe all life is sacred! Nobody does, and they’re no exception. Bacteria, viruses, mosquitoes, weeds, parasites, vegetables, fruits, grains – churchy people don’t think those kinds of life are sacred. It’s pompous rhetoric, and they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, because it can’t possibly be true. Yet get away with it they do.
The other other day Desmond Tutu was on the local public radio station. I admire Tutu, as most people do; from what I know he’s a sterling fella. But he did say this one thing…that the universe is a moral place, and that truth and justice always ultimately prevail. No – it isn’t and they don’t. Especially the universe is not a moral place – I think that’s such a mistake. The universe is a bunch of gas and rock; it’s no more moral than my kettle is when I put it on to boil water. We’re here and the universe is there and the universe couldn’t possibly care less about us or about morality. If there’s going to be any morality it has to come from us. That’s sad, because we’re not much good at it, but we’re all there is. And, alas, truth and justice don’t ultimately prevail, not least because there is no ulitmately, there’s only a series of nows, all of which are shot through with truth and justice not prevailing.
The odd thing about this — I thought when I first read it — is that it’s just an assertion too. Bunches of cells are not persons. How does Harries know? They pope thinks they are. How do Christians make distinctions here? Isn’t it always possible to reposte with this kind of reply to theological claims? Because Harries is making a theological claim here, about the reality of what is there, and whether that reality is ever cashed in in terms of heaven. So, how does he know?
Harries is using the rational Christian ploy. You show yourself rational by saying something that looks rational — because it’s coming to the same conclusion that rational people come to. But it only looks that way. The truth is that he hasn’t a rational leg to stand on.
When the chips are down, Harries can run with the hounds just as well as with the hares. At other times he’ll come over all fuzzy and holy. It’s something that comes with practice. Clergy have to look both ways: towards the people they serve or lead, and the world outside where the in language isn’t understood. In the end, they just play games with words, because nothing they say is really helpful to anyone. Why do you think that Rowan Williams doesn’t make sense, even to himself?!
Not the least worst. There are more humane priests (or bishops, come to it) than Harries. I still recall his remark, in his book on Christianity, Judaism and the Holocaust: “After the Evil” (OUP, 2003): “I would argue,” he writes, “that it is dangerous to talk of history being a continuing source of revelation, if new revelation is meant.” (100). And then he goes on to speak about slavery, and how “Christians began to see that slavery was incompatible with the deeper truths of the New Testament.” (loc. cit.)
So, not the least worst. Perhaps only one of the better of the less bad.
I thought it was the ‘new’ atheists who were whiggish and Panglossian? I’m so confused.
Useful quotations; thanks, Eric.
Well done Christians – after some eighteen centuries they slowly, haltingly began to see that slavery might not be quite the thing. Impressive.
“the universe is a moral place, and that truth and justice always ultimately prevail.”
He is talking through his ‘religious’ Tutu. This is utter rubbish.
Well, it is – though of course it’s rooted in a benevolent motive, and I find it impossible to get as exasperated with Tutu as I do with most wool-gathering clerics. I suppose that’s because of his history. He’s probably a major reason the transition from apartheid was (in the end) a peaceful one.
But still. It just isn’t true.
Tutu has been on the right side almost all his life. (Even Ndungane, his successor, seemed to be screwed down right.) But the right side was the side fighting for justice. The fact that there wasn’t any doesn’t show, surely, that the universe is a moral place, and that truth and justice ultimately prevail. What it shows is that morality, truth and justice are all very human things and have to be fought for, over and over again. The fact that Tutu did fight for these things says a lot about the man, but very little for his beliefs about the universe.
Just so. And there simply is no ultimately. For a lot of people, injustice is all they ever know. Of course archbishops are committed to believing in eternity, but…
“Chatting with Clerics.” Would that be something like Rick Mercer’s “Talking to Americans”?
Eric would you say Tutu was on the right side when he refered to Winney Mandella as an icon of liberation? (He said that in front of the woman who,s child had been murdered by Mandella and her thugs). I dont see much to admire about Tutu,unlike doctor King or Ghandi he advocated the use of extreme violence to bring about an end to aparteid and was prepared to excuse the most apalling barbarism by the A.N.C. To my mind he was Jerry Adams in a dog collar!
Rich,
You feel like backing up your assertions?