The New Testament and the new atheism: Alternative narrations

Introduction

The relationship between the New Testament and the new atheism is not an immediately perceptible one. While not unknown, atheism was not a major cultural or intellectual presence in the world in which the New Testament emerged. With its monotheism and dependence on the Old Testament, Judaism was the source of the New Testament's religious world-view. The pagan world was likewise religious, with (mostly) a tolerant, pluralistic approach to unknown deities. ¹ That does not mean, however, that the New Testament has no voice in contemporary debates on atheism. ² Apart from anything else, there is a strange parallel between secular atheism and New Testament theology. The new atheism is a narration on its own account, a meta-narrative that purports, through the enlargement of science, to offer a cohesive account of the world. The New Testament likewise comprises a meta-narrative, a telling of creation in the light of its Creator: ultimate meaning in face of the divine narration.

Theism and engagement

The New Testament, in all its diversity, offers an overtly theistic vision of the world. Biblical faith is not deistic with a vague deity existing in some remote relationship to the world, who can be captured – if at all – in a hazy sense of mystery. That kind of agnosticism can mark the beginning of dialogue with Christian faith, but it is not essentially Christian. The New Testament, on the contrary, believes in a God who is radically involved in the world, from start to finish. God is the origin and goal of the world’s being. In different ways and through different symbols, the New Testament outlines a unique understanding of who God is and what God does: past, present and future. This vision is protological, teleological and eschatological, presenting God as engaged with the world to bring it to its telos, its ultimate fulfilment. The New Testament presents a God of revelation: yes, to be read in the pages of nature, in dialogue with science, but revealed above all in the concrete history of a people, a culture, a book.

There are a number of metaphors the New Testament employs to denote this engaged, self-revealing God which together form a meta-narrative. These smaller narrative and symbolic sequences have in common extraordinary twists and turns that make the plot surprising, unexpected, even revolutionary. The reader (or listener) is drawn into their dynamic – drawn in by implied connections to her life through characterization, by the vibrancy of the address, by imagery that has universal, as well as contextual, appeal. In effect, the reader is invited to place her story within the pages of the gospel story: to set it within its broad horizon, and to allow it to touch, teach, transform. The Jesus who emerges from the Gospels is one who is involved in human life: who responds to real needs, who proclaims forgiveness and liberation, who draws in the outsiders, who takes on the powers-that-be.

Not only is the life of Jesus definitive in this narrative vision but also all the Gospels pay considerable attention to the last week, and indeed, the last few days of Jesus’ life. Far from sweeping his embarrassing and humiliating death under the carpet, the evangelists perceive a unique theology in the events of Jesus’ crucifixion and, if anything, give particular emphasis to it. This is because – again, in their very different ways – they perceive the cross as integral to a divine narration that has the capacity to overturn worlds.

The resurrection, in particular, displays most dramatically this evangelical rhetoric of reversal. The Gospel narratives are unusual in that the resurrection comes not only as the climax of each Gospel (including the empty tomb story in Mark 16.1–8) but also as the presupposition of the narrative right from the beginning. It is the lens through which the life and death of Jesus are viewed. In outlining the shape and tenor of fairy tales, J. R. R Tolkien speaks of the ‘eucatastrophe’ of the Easter events in the New Testament – the unexpectedly joyful ending supplied by the resurrection, when everything else appears to have ended in tragedy: Jesus’ arrest, trial, conviction and death. ³ In a similar vein, the Australian poet, Noel Rowe, has Mary speaking of her Son ‘making contradiction’ throughout his life. He paints a personified picture of the grave, with its mouth open in astonishment at the resurrection.⁴ Rowe, like Tolkien, depicts the overturning of the Gospel narrative which draws the reader into its topsy-turvy dynamic.

It is worth drawing attention to two images or motifs in the Gospels that exemplify this comprehensive quality of the New Testament narration and its profound capacity for reversal. ⁵ Both motifs reflect the Gospel vision of reality, representing visions potentially more persuasive than those offered by atheism.

The kingdom of God in Mark

The first notion, as a significant dimension of the New Testament meta-narrative, is that of God’s kingdom. The divine basileia is the dominant motif or image of the Synoptic Gospels. Although the symbolism has a topographical sense, it is primarily theological: it speaks of divine activity more than it does of territory or domain. God’s basileia, in Jewish post-exilic thinking, takes on a distinctly eschatological character, and comes to represent the final, grace-filled rule of God over the world. Because of its apocalyptic character, the fulfilment of the divine basileia comes about through struggle and confrontation.

Mark’s Gospel is perhaps the best exemplar of this. While Mark uses no language of ‘fall’, there is an implied disjunction in the world which the Markan Jesus confronts. The cosmic battle between good and evil is made plain in the Temptation narrative which, unlike its Synoptic counterparts, contains no reference to actual ‘temptations’ (1.12–13). Instead, the Beloved Son is driven into the desert to come face-to-face with Satan. In the end Jesus is surrounded by angels and wild beasts, symbols of that final harmony and reconciliation brought about by the overthrow of Satan. It is no accident that the first miracle in Mark is an exorcism (1.21–27), signifying the mythic war between the forces of good and evil, which Jesus’ coming engages. The reign of God – that just, benign and sovereign rule – can only come into being with the defeat and overthrow of evil.

Early in the Gospel, Mark begins to indicate that such defeat will not come about by superior force of arms. Even though Jesus is ‘the stronger one’, who can overpower ‘the strong man’ (3.27), the choice he takes in the end lies in the opposite direction. Instead of overpowering, he renounces power; in place of conquest, he experiences what appears (in every human sense) to be defeat; as against victory, he chooses the path of suffering. As the story of Caesarea Philippi and the Transfiguration make clear – the central diptych of the Gospel narrative – the path of suffering is God’s path, God’s way of disclosing glory (8.27—9.13). At the heart of Mark’s narrative stands the cross, and the self-giving God who lies behind it.

There is then a radical entry into suffering that is integral to God’s reign, God’s way of operating in the world, despite all cultural and religious expectations to the contrary. For Mark, that entry reaches its lowest point, its nadir, in the cry of dereliction from the cross, where the Beloved Son plumbs the depths of human desolation and anguish (15.34). ⁶ Just as he once scaled the cosmic heights at the Transfiguration, so now Jesus descends into the waters of abandonment, as indicated at the beginning of the Gospel in his baptism (1.9–11). It is this cosmic journey which the Son undertakes in order to bring to birth God’s beneficent reign. In the end, we are left with an empty tomb, an angel’s message of resurrection and the ambiguous response of the women disciples: their awestruck flight and silence (16.1–8).

In what way does the Markan narrative, with all its symbolism, contribute to the New Testament’s explanation of human existence? In the first place, it draws a stark picture of human suffering – in the various diseases which Jesus heals, including death itself; in the exorcisms which present desolating pictures of alienation and ruin brought upon innocent victims; in the awareness that eschatological suffering affects not only people but also nature; in the sense of powerful social and religious structures crushing the lives of ordinary people, controlling, regulating, suppressing. Mark also – perhaps problematically for us – presupposes the existence of another order of created beings who participate in this struggle, either with Jesus or against him. However we might interpret these forces today, they indicate that Mark sees pain, evil and death as cosmic forces over and above the everyday, infiltrating and poisoning human life.

Secondly, the Markan narrative offers a remedy for this cosmic predicament in the sending of the Beloved Son. Jesus’ ministry indicates God’s apocalyptic determination to rid the world of its venom, and to do so by absorbing the poison. There is a victory, a vibrant hope in this narrative, but a hope that works paradoxically: Jesus’ entry into desolation and death is precisely what transforms his death into life, and therefore the death of every human being and, arguably, creation as a whole. ⁷ Jesus’ divinely human story embraces every story in creation, drawing it, through identification, towards life and hope – towards the realisation of God’s eschatological reign and the glorious coming of the Son of Man (13.26; 14.62).

The Incarnation in John

The second example of the New Testament meta-narrative is the motif of Incarnation in the Gospel of John. Of course, the word ‘Incarnation’ never appears in the Gospel, but what does control this conception is the flesh–glory dichotomy. This is core Johannine language – arguably, the core language of the Fourth Gospel. ⁸ The Prologue sets out the dynamic between the two, a dynamic that undergirds the ensuing narrative. ‘Flesh’ is first used in apparently negative fashion to signify the inability to bridge the gulf between Creator and creation: no human decision or action can make people become ‘children of God’; only God can give birth to believers (1.13, cf. 3.3–8). Once again, as with Mark’s Gospel, the language and imagery of ‘fall’ is absent. Yet, like Mark, John assumes a basic disjunction between Creator and creation. On the one hand, creation is the product of God’s work, through the Logos (1.3–4). On the other hand, ‘his own’ fail to recognise their Creator, implying that something has come between them, impeding their vision and alienating them from their true identity as God’s ‘children’, formed and created in God’s image (1.10–11). So, already in John’s Gospel, we have an outline of the Johannine contribution to the New Testament narration: a theological understanding of the origins of the world, its plight and its redemption, seen as the restoration of created identity.

The second reference to flesh makes clear the means of that restoration (1.14). Here, ironically enough, it is flesh that restores flesh. This time it is the en-flesh-ment of God which makes the difference. The divine Logos, through whom all the world was made, now crosses the otherwise impassable gulf, and becomes one with the creation he has made: divinity crosses over into humanity. This flesh – the flesh of the divine Word – radiates divine glory, unlike the ineffective flesh of 1.13 (cf. 6.63). In other words, it is the flesh of the Son in his Incarnation which constitutes the central, redeeming feature of the Fourth Gospel. Jesus’ subsequent ministry is about the revelation of glory in the ‘flesh’ of miracle and sign (cf. 2.11): nature miracles, healings, the raising of the dead all reveal, in tangible shape and form, the true identity of Jesus himself, the divinely human Son. The climax is reached in the crucifixion which – in contrast to that of Mark – represents the high point, the zenith, of Jesus’ life and ministry.

Almost nine chapters of the Fourth Gospel focus, one way or another, on the crucifixion and its implications and meaning (chs 11—19) – the cross viewed, not as a Markan experience of redemptive humiliation and powerlessness but rather as the full and final manifestation of divine glory in human flesh. Jesus’ cry from the cross, ‘It is finished!’ (tetelestai, 19.29), is a cry of completion, accomplishment and victory: the carrying out of the Father’s will, the loving of those who are his ‘to the end’ (cf. 13.1), and the triumph over ‘the ruler of this world’ (cf. 12.31; 14.30; 16.11). The cross is, in a sense, the ladder by which Jesus returns to the Father, the realm of glory whence he came (cf. 12.28–29; 17.1, 5). In an extended sense, it is also the Son’s ascent to the Father, the prayer by which he gathers up ‘his own’, drawing all people and all things to himself, taking them with him into the Father’s glory (cf. 17.24–26).

The theme of sacrifice is also apparent in this complex and paradoxical imagery of the cross. The Jerusalem authorities refuse to enter the praetorium for fear of ritual defilement preventing them eating the Passover (18.28). But the Passover Lamb stands before them, and it is they who are, in part, responsible for his slaughter at the same hour the lambs in the temple are slaughtered for the feast. Here is, in John the Baptist’s words, ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ (1.29). Glorification, victory, sacrifice, the definitive removal of sin, the gathering in of ‘his own’ – all these images and motifs flood the Johannine Passion story, filling it with meaning, a meaning drawn out in the Easter garden with the final gathering of the community of faith (20.1–29) and its sending forth in mission (21.1–19).

What is cosmic in this narrative is not identical to Mark's Gospel, but nonetheless many of the same elements are to be found. Like Mark, John presents his view of a fallen world that only God can rescue and restore in Jesus Christ. There is a cosmic picture of the world’s context – a lostness, an alienation – which can only be resolved by divine intervention. Whereas in Mark, that intervention is apparent in Jesus’ walking onto the Gospel stage proclaiming the reign of God (Mark 1.14–15), in John it is Jesus, the Word-made-flesh, whose incarnate glory radiates everything he says and does.

Not only is there a cosmic analysis of the world’s lostness; there is also a divine resolution, clothed in human form. Whereas in Mark, the remedy lies paradoxically in the humiliation of the cross, in John the archetypal symbol is the flow of blood and water from the side of the crucified Jesus, a moment of pure glory – sacramental life triumphantly attained in the very teeth of death (19.34). The difference is, if anything, eschatological. For Mark, the Son of Man is still to come in glory with the holy angels (Mark 13.26–27). In John, the Son of Man is the incarnate Christ, already come, the one on whom the disciples will see ‘angels descending and ascending’ (1.51). John has a divine future in mind, but a future radically anticipated in the believing community: where joy and peace abound, where resurrection can already be attained, where celestial glory fills each moment of its life.

Thus Mark and John give their respective accounts of the cosmos and the meaning of human existence within it. Each in its own way does so with a depth and realism that invite its non-Christian and non-theistic rivals to surpass.

Conclusion

This article assumes that, while the New Testament may seem to possess no immediate and direct relevance to the new atheism, ⁹ it nevertheless has an important voice in these debates. What the New Testament offers is a life-giving and dynamic narration in comparison to the limited narration proposed by secular atheism. The two examples cited above— the kingdom in Mark and the Incarnation in John – illustrate how the New Testament provides a coherent and engaging meta-narrative for human life and creation that is profoundly theistic. This narration is based on the notion of a God who not only exists but also has created the world and takes responsibility for its salvation and fulfilment. In the Christian narration depicted here, no magic divine wand is waved. Instead, God enters the stricken reality of the world and transforms it from within, overcoming violence and death by submitting to them, and offering a profound hope for the future destiny of the world. This future is not the world’s but God’s.

The New Testament cosmic narration presents an alternative world-view to that of secular atheism. The Christian narration makes plain that an atheistic world-view is a meta-narrative of its own – with its own protology and eschatology – endeavouring to explain cogently the complex realities of the world. Science is the vehicle used in this rival narration, but science used beyond its capacity. In the face of suffering, the narration of secular atheism is constantly threatened by nihilism, a world-view without possibility of atonement, restitution or hope. In this sense, the New Testament narration of Jesus Christ as the centre and meaning of history challenges atheism not simply, or even primarily, by its arguments for God’s existence, but rather by its interpretation of the reality of the world’s being and the need for, and provision of, salvation. It is the kind of God which is at issue here for the New Testament writers, each of whom, in different ways, narrates the story of God’s intimate dealings with creation through Christ. This divine narration provides a cogent explanation of the world in all its beauty, promise and suffering, and offers, above all, the eschatological hope of its transformation beyond anything atheism can offer. In the end, the two accounts, the new atheism and the New Testament, are alternative narrations: rival and conflicting accounts that proffer radically different assessments of the meaning and destiny of creation. Christian faith argues that the New Testament narration offers the more cogent option.