The Twilight of Atheism

I recently read The Twilight of Atheism by Alister McGrath. It's a chronicle of the rise and fall of atheism as a cultural driving force from roughly the seventeenth century to the present.

Although the author is Protestant, he suggests the Reformation unintentionally caused the rise of deism and atheism a few generations later. It wasn't just because the Reformation made people start questioning traditional beliefs. He sees something inherently deficient in classical Protestantism's view of God and his relationship with the world.

"[According to the Reformers] God had chosen to reveal himself through the Bible, and the authorized mode of knowing God was therefore through reading that Bible, and hearing sermons based upon its contents.... Throughout the Middle Ages, God was held to be encountered in the natural world and through the sacramental mysteries of baptism and the mass. Whatever risks such an understanding entailed, it nevertheless affirmed that it was possible to experience God in the patterns of day-to-day living."

Huldrych Zwingli was an early reformer and was one of the first to deny Christ's real presence in the Eucharist. According to him, communion was a symbolic remembrance and nothing more. McGrath observes that this puts the emphasis on Christ's absence instead of his presence.

"Where Catholicism allowed a direct encounter between the believer and spiritual realities, Zwingli resolutely refused to acknowledge that spiritual realities could ever be known through the material world. Christ was in heaven; Christian worship was about recalling what Christ had done in the past and looking forward to his future return. But in the present -- in the here and now -- Christ was known only as an absence. The rise of Protestantism thus gave rise to an absent God who was known only indirectly... For Protestants, especially those tracing their lineage back to Calvin or Zwingli, there can be no sense of sacred space or place.... The outcome was inevitable and predictable. God became an absence in the world."

[Speaking of Zwingli's church in Zurich] "The dull, joyless, and unattractive churches of Protestantism conveyed the subliminal message that the God who was to be found in them shared these disagreeable characteristics... Its simplicity is admirable... But the building speaks subtly of a silent, absent, and distant God. The Protestant reluctance to picture God has all too often led to an envisioning of the world that is bleak and barren, where it ought to be saturated with the radiance of the glory of God. Once more, it is a small step from declaring that God cannot be pictured to suggesting that he cannot be conceived as a living reality in the rich imaginative life of humanity."

Well, whether you agree with the connection to atheism or not, I think he has some good points.

Pentacostalism is a huge tidal wave of reaction against intellectual, Bible-focused Protestantism. Charismatics allow for direct experiences of God outside of reading the Bible. I thought this was very dangerous when I was a Protestant myself.

Now that I'm Orthodox, I see more where they're coming from. After all, saints through the centuries have had all kinds of miraculous things happen around and through them. Orthodoxy also believes it's possible to experience the "uncreated Light" of God directly -- of course, only as a gift of God. We believe God sanctifies and uses everything in creation, from water to oil to bread and wine. The cross is holy, icons are holy, days are holy, the church is holy, and so on. If you let it soak into you, it's really a different way of viewing both God and the world.

"O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth! You are everywhere filling all things! Treasury of blessings and Giver of life, come and abide in us and cleanse us from every impurity and save our souls, O Good One!"