Religious theism or irreligious atheism

Timothy Jackson teaches Christian ethics at Emory University. I was fortunate enough to take a class with him when I earned my MDiv at Candler School of Theology, the Methodist seminary on campus. I’m currently reading his latest book for a review I’ll write later this month; the book is about the Shoah, anti-Semitism, and Christian supersessionism.

Jackson is a prolific academic, and has written about, and in response to, all manner of thinkers and ideas. In 2014 he wrote a response to Ronald Dworkin’s posthumous book Religion Without God in the pages of the Journal of Law and Religion. It’s a perceptive, accessible introduction to Jackson’s generous mind and capacious approach to positions with which he disagrees. His writing is crystal clear, philosophically speaking, and it’s a pleasure to read such forthright Christian claims in a venue like JLR, in consideration of a figure like Dworkin. Here’s a sample:

For my part, I am far less confident that non-subjectivist aesthetics, ethics, and religion can survive without God. Where Dworkin perceives a third alternative, I suspect an either/or: I see no credible via media between irreligious atheism and religious theism. Biblical faith may be false, but, if so, we are left with some form of emotivism, existentialism, or pragmatism. We are consigned, that is, to constructing or inventing or just asserting our own values. Merely willed or fabricated ideals take us far from most Western normative disciplines, as Nietzsche realized. The notion that the beautiful, the good, and the true are objective was, for him, the last implausible vestige of Jewish and Christian theism. (Sometimes Nietzsche indicted Socratic and Platonic philosophy as well.) If the biblical God is dead, or missing, better to be frankly irreligious and to talk in terms of “power” and “fitness.” On this one point, it is hard to argue with the Antichrist.

I suspect that that Nietzsche is correct: Christ—religious theism—and the Antichrist—irreligious atheism—exhaust our options. To side with the former as the truth of our condition is not to say that all artistic, virtuous, or faithful people must be self-conscious Christian or even professing theists. That is manifestly false. But it is to contend that atheism, whether it calls itself “religious” or “irreligious,” is mistaken because “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). We may fail to recognize the “Father of lights” and thus may not give Him credit, but without that Father, there would be no lamp even to hide under a bushel. God is omni-relevant, axiologically, even if He is obscure, epistemically.

Go read the rest. There’s a lot more where that came from.