Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters

14. Risk Assessment: Is the Story Dangerous?

379 Is the Story Dangerous? Risk Assessment 14 A creed can only be absolute in its historical existence, not universally valid for all. . . . The claim to exclusive possession of truth, that tool of fanaticism, of human arrogance and self-deception through the will to power, that disaster for the West . . . can be vanquished by the very fact that God has manifested himself historically in several fashions and has opened up many ways toward Himself. Karl Jaspers 1 A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it. Proverbs 22:3 I have argued in chapter 13 that the biblical story about how the world came to be, what the human place in it is, and how we should live here is plausible. Is it at the same time dangerous? As the biblical book of Proverbs observes, a prudent person will always want to avoid danger. Is there danger, then, in biblical faith, from which we might wish to “take refuge,” rather than “keep going and suffer for it”? My argument in this chapter, in brief, will be as follows: there is some danger, but not 380 Seriously Dangerous Religion of the kind that people often imagine. Biblical faith is dangerous only in promoting the good. On God and the World Biblical faith insists on the devotion of the whole person to the one creator God (Deuteronomy 6:4-5; John 14:6), and it is routinely claimed nowadays that this is dangerous—that it leads inevitably to narrowness of thought, dogmatism, violence, and even war. This is certainly what proponents of the axial age hypothesis have typically believed; Karl Jaspers invented this “age” precisely to counter this perceived threat. As the quotation in our first epigraph reminds us, he was convinced that human beings need a larger and more generous story than the biblical one, which he connected directly with the barbarism and the dark passions of his own period of history (mid-twentieth-century Germany ). We need a story, he claimed, with which all human beings can identify, whatever their own traditions might be.2 Likewise, the proponents of dark green religion, who tend to be hostile toward monotheistic religion in general and favor instead a “preaxial” spirituality that is local and pluralistic, have been forthright on the dangerous nature of the biblical story. They associate monotheism, and especially Christian monotheism, with imperial agriculture, authoritarian nationalism , violence, bigotry, and anthropocentrism (and thus the rape of the planet). For Derrick Jensen, for example, biblical faith legitimates the conquest of all other cultures and the planet. Beyond these two groups of critics, we find Marc Ellis arguing that “monotheistic religions . . . are born in a cycle of violence” and that violence inevitably continues within them and between them.3 We also find Regina Schwartz writing a book that concerns, as her subtitle tells us, “the violent legacy of monotheism” and advocates a return to the pluralism that monotheism has suppressed.4 Just how far such ideas have taken root in popular, post-Christian, Western culture can easily be gauged simply by carrying out an Internet search for the phrase “Christianity is dangerous.” The Character of God Is the biblical view of God dangerous, then? At least two things must be said in response to this kind of claim. It seems to me, first of all, that it is not belief in the oneness of God that, of itself, results in the terrible things that monotheism’s detractors associate with it. Rather, it is a Risk Assessment 381 particular view of the character of the one God and what this means for how I should live—what this one God’s will is. For example, if the one God is not “for” all creatures, but only “for” human beings, and he wills that I should live in a manner consistent with this “truth,” then it may well be that nonhuman creation will suffer. Again, if the one God is not “for” all human beings, but only “for” me and my tribe or my state, and he wills that I should live in a manner consistent with this “truth,” then bigotry and violence toward other human beings may well follow. If, however, the one God is the kind of person that I have described in this book, such consequences do not at all follow. In this case, I find myself obliged to imitate a God...