An Oxonian Father Brown
by Edward Short - December 12, 2008
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
Was Jesus God?
Richard Swinburne, Oxford University Press, 192 pages, $24.95
In 1942, Robert Lowell wrote his good friend, the storyteller Peter Taylor,
The Catholic Church almost always makes great pragmatical claims so that one might almost say that common sense is impossible without faith in Christ. However, neither books nor letters nor talk will convert you, but only prayers principally your own with God's grace. Read Hopkins's letters, he says this to Bridges who wrote that before joining any religion he would have to be intellectually convinced – a stubborn and typically late Victorian bit of irrationality.
To a degree, Lowell was right: If we mean to be truly converted, we cannot expect reason to do the hard work of faith, nor neglect prayer. But he was wrong to slight the considerable role reason plays in faith. The great Thomist Etienne Gilson, whose books were instrumental in converting Lowell (briefly) to Roman Catholicism, would certainly not have considered the later Victorians "irrational" for requiring to be "intellectually convinced" of the claims of Christianity, though he would have agreed with Hopkins that a more expedient way to foster faith in Christ is to give alms. Why? "It changes the whole man," Hopkins assured his skeptical friend, "not his mind only but the will and everything."
Since philosophers of religion can help form minds to appreciate the vitality of alms, as well as the claims of faith, it is heartening to encounter one who is at once skillful and devout. In Was Jesus God?, Richard Swinburne, the former Nolloth Professor at Oxford, adroitly marshals the evidences of natural theology to affirm the cogency of the Christian faith. A leading light in the philosophy of religion, Swinburne has also written an acclaimed trilogy defending Christianity. His latest book serves as a popular coda to that extended work.
Swinburne observes that most people get their faith in God from deep personal experience or from the testimony of others. Apropos religious experience, he says, "If we did not believe that what… we are experiencing (perceiving or feeling) is really there, when there are no good reasons for doubting that that thing is really there, we couldn't believe anything." As to testimony, "If we didn't believe what others told us, for example, about history or geography, until we had checked it for ourselves, we would have very few beliefs." It follows from this, Swinburne argues, that "most people need positive arguments in favour of the existence of God if they are to have good reason to believe that there is a God, but they also need grounds to believe that arguments against the existence of God do not work."
Here, he clearly has in mind the philosophers Daniel Dennett, A.C. Grayling, Michael Onfray, Sam Harris, the biologist Richard Dawkins, and the journalist Christopher Hitchens, all of whom have recently attacked religion as irrational, barbarous, and evil. The purpose of Swinburne's newest book, however, is not so much to answer the objections of this newest batch of atheists as to defend the doctrines encapsulated in the Nicene Creed, which he calls the "central doctrines of Christianity, common to virtually all Christians."
Roman Catholics might very well counter that the "central doctrines of Christianity" are only defined and embodied in the Roman Catholic Faith. They might also balk at Swinburne's reference to what he calls "the Church," which he defines "as the Apostolic Church founded by Jesus." The logician in Swinburne must recognize that defending this Protestant fiction lands him on shaky ground.
He makes his ground shakier still when he claims that "there is no need for me, when considering the truth of these doctrines, to face the difficult issue of what are the boundaries of the Church, that is, which one or more ecclesial bodies constitute it." Of course, in speaking of "the Church," one can only be referring to the Roman Catholic Church: It is entirely illogical to imagine that God would have founded more than one "one, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church."Nonetheless, even Catholics can benefit from Swinburne's witty defense of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Four Last Things.
Apropos the Trinity, Swinburne follows Richard of St. Victor in arguing that "the love of the Father for the Son must include a wish to cooperate with the Son in further total sharing with an equal; and hence the need for a third member of the Trinity, whom, following the tradition, we may call the Holy Spirit, whom they will love and by whom they will be loved." He follows Augustine in holding that "a solitary God would have been an ungenerous god and so no God." From this, Swinburne concludes that "the Father and the Son would have been less than perfectly good unless they sought to spread their mutual love of cooperating in further sharing with an equal"; hence, the Holy Spirit. He might also have cited Irenaeus, who describes the different but related functions of the three persons thus: "The Spirit prepares man for the Son of God; the Son leads man to the Father; the Father gives man immortality;" or Gregory of Nyssa who sums up, with epigrammatical élan, how the three persons relate to one another: "Nor must you be surprised, if, as if speaking in riddles, we produce the new and paradoxical conception of a united separation and a separated union."
Swinburne appeals to common sense to defend the reasonableness of the Virgin Birth:
Since [Jesus] had, to all appearances, normal human bodily characteristics, he presumably had a full set of chromosomes and so genes such as normal humans derive from two parents… But it would not have taken a very large miracle for God to turn some of the material of Mary's egg into a second half-set of chromosomes, which, together with the normal half-set derived from Mary, would provide a full set.
But what would be the point of Jesus having a human mother? Swinburne's explanation is rather muddled:
It would mean that Jesus came into existence as a human on earth partly by the normal process… and partly as a result of a quite abnormal process. It would thus be a historical event symbolizing the doctrine of the Incarnation, that Jesus is partly of human origin and so has a human nature, and partly of divine origin and so has a divine nature.
To say that Jesus was "partly human" and "partly divine" mutilates the mystery of Christ, who, as the Nicene Creed states, became fully human and was yet "true God of true God." That Swinburne should be so unclear about Christ's relation to Mary is attributable perhaps to his having been brought up in the Anglican tradition, which has always neglected Our Lady.
Swinburne sensibly sees only unacceptable objectionsto the reasonableness of eternal damnation. God could, of course, endow the wicked after death with good desires,
but that would impose on them a character which they had persistently and knowingly chosen not to have… But if he is to respect humans as people, if he gives them a choice of character, he must respect that choice and permit them permanently to reject him and all he stands for. Otherwise in creating humans God would be like a puppet master who ensures that in the end every human does what [God] wants, and has no ultimate freedom to determine the sort of person they are to be.
Conversely, "if we come to have a good character God will give us the wonderful life of Heaven. Christianity thus offers us salvation from the guilt of the past and from wrongdoing in the present, in order to live a holy life for ever in the future."
In considering the question of whether Jesus is God, Swinburne sounds like a good detective – a sort of Oxonian Father Brown.
It is not merely the case that Jesus is the only serious candidate in human history about whom we have evidence that he lived the right kind of life which ended with divine signature. Jesus was both the only prophet in human history about whose life there is good historical evidence of the first kind (evidence that he or she lived a perfect life with much suffering, claimed to be divine, claimed to be making atonement, gave plausible moral and theological teaching, and founded a Church to continue his work), and also the only prophet about whose life there is good historical evidence of the second kind (evidence that his or her life ended with a miracle recognizable as a divine signature). Not merely did Muhammad or the Buddha not give the right sort of teaching (they did not claim to be God Incarnate etc.), but their lives ended in altogether non-miraculous ways… This shows that the coincidence of the two sets of evidence about one prophet that his or her life exhibited both features would be very improbable in the normal course of things. It would be very improbable unless God arranged it. And… it would have been dishonest of God to arrange evidence of this kind unless that prophet was indeed God Incarnate. And in virtue of his perfect goodness God would not do that. Hence, the coincidence of the two kinds of evidence does not merely make it very probable that, if there is a God, he became incarnate in Jesus, but it makes it much more probable than it would be otherwise that there is a God.
Reading this, one can only imagine the howls of exasperation it will provoke in the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens. But Swinburne has unpalatable things to say to those in his own camp as well. Having left the Anglican for the Eastern Orthodox Church, he will not endear himself to his current co-religionists with this.
The observance of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, with a proper attitude of humility before God and avoiding these as a means of acquiring a good reputation on earth, are also evident themes of Jesus's teaching. So too is honesty, and thus the avoidance of hypocrisy. It is, he taught, more important to show love to those in need than to conform to exact details of ritual.
Was Jesus God? is an entertaining, bracing, compelling book and welcome proof that not all of our academics have turned their backs on what Hopkins once called "the fine delight that fathers thought."
