Croaking

The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world could actually come to an end… Plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late…

                                             Bill Maher – August 2009

The other night I saw Bill Maher on a cable news program.  He’s gotten even shriller over the last fourteen months.  He zeros in on Christians as particularly “stupid” and “irrational.” 

You could say this is simply his shtick for ratings, but it is hard to deny that he truly believes what he is saying.  He’s certainly willing to stake his reputation on stating such beliefs.  You can rightly say that with his recent cable network switch and his new show, that his market share is a smidge above Congress’s approval rating.  However he still has enough of a following in pop culture to be a national figure.  You may even say “Bill who?” but somebody is listening to his rants because they were willing to produce, and promote a nationally distributed movie promoting his anti-Christian views. 

Maher is the perfect picture of a rationalist in our time.   I don’t mean to say he’s rational.  The core understanding of his worldview is flawed just like the premise of the statement above.  He’s assuming that religion always “diverts” a person to destructive courses.  That premise just doesn’t hold factual water – Really? - In every, or even most cases?

That is why he’s in fact an endangered species in this postmodern culture.  Maher is a good example of someone who is seeking to rehabilitate rationalism as a belief-system and a way of life. 

Rationalism was in it’s heyday from the second half of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth.  Typically rationalism is a characteristic of the last great cultural and philosophical era – the modernist era.  Then came post-modernism with its relativism and subjective “my truth is my truth, and yours is yours” approach to life.

Rationalism as defined here is basically the notion that reason or logic is only way of knowing anything -- As opposed to revelation (a divine being has revealed truth to us) or subjectivism (if it feels true to me it must be true – a view also rampant today in the form of relativism).  The person who is committed to rationalism assumes a lot for the power of their own intelligence and rational powers!  After all, how does one really know reasonable certainty that what you see, experience, or can think about is all that is?

Still Bill Maher represents the dual reality of a present day rationalist.  While people on the average American street, are becoming less and less inclined to believe that reason alone can solve humankind’s problems, rationalism sneaks in the back door of people’s thinking via relativism.  If everything is relative, and I have to trust my own thoughts and feelings to show me what’s really true in the universe, then I get to chose.  If logic seems to me like it should reign supreme, then for me at least, it does.  In other words there is enough residue in most people’s brains of the enlightenment idea of rationalism for this kind of thinking to resonate.  When entertainers like Maher say that religion in general and Christianity in particular just doesn’t make any logical sense it will strike a nerve in many people.  So, Bill Maher gets a hearing, and he will for the foreseeable future.  This all raises concerns about his rising militancy.

What Maher and his ilk fail to see is that Christianity is not about the denigration or even the suspension of reason – far from it.  We believe our reasoning capabilities are a gift from our Creator, to be used in understanding the world and his revelation to us.  However, if there is truly a creator as Christians believe, then it is only reasonable that the creation will never trump the Creator as the final authority on what is good, beautiful, and true.  So rather than denying logic Christian epistemology strongly opposes the veneration of the rational – or any other human endeavors – over all else. 

While in exile in the first century the apostle John had a vision of “what must take place.”   He saw a battle raging in the spiritual realms.  In the sixteenth chapter of Revelation the seven bowls of God’s wrath are poured out on the earth.  As the sixth angel pours out his bowl John reports this:

¹³ Then I saw three evil spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet. 

Words are apparently very important to God because we hear a lot about them in his revelation.  In that light one wonders what these voices in the shape of amphibians represent.  Rationalism would certainly be a candidate.  In the next verse these beings go out and convince and pull together the “kings” of the earth to array in battle against God Almighty.  In other words they reason these earthly rulers in to following them on a suicide mission. Do we hear such voices today?

In his commentary on Revelation Dr. Craig Keener points out what many scholars have come to believe today.  John’s apocalypse served a dual purpose.  He was writing what he saw to be the future as God revealed it to him, yes.  However, John’s phraseology also struck at the core of the intellectual and political power structures of Rome.  The metaphor of frogs in that day implied the following.

The image is grotesque; ancients usually viewed frogs as unclean, ugly, and vicious. They could function as a terrible omen, especially if they leaped from another creature’s mouth. One writer close to John’s day remarked tongue-in-cheek that Nero nearly was reincarnated as a viper, but mercifully was allowed to become a frog so he could continue his singing.

So I guess we should expect to hear some croaking with every age and every generation.

I am not at this point meaning to debate whether we are in the end times now (though for the NT the end of days started in a very real sense with the ascension of Jesus).    However, we have to this day that croaking sound all around us.  As we have seen in some cases the chirp is getting louder.   Nor am I questioning the literal nature of the eventual outcomes in what John saw on Patmos.  At the same time we are now in a culture where many, even some “Christians” have the hardware in their heads to rationalize just about anything.  

As a result the scorched-earth technique displayed by Bill Maher is spreading fast.  Thus the devaluing of people with whom one disagrees continues without the slightest concern for getting to the truth about one’s own assumptions.  It is the height of reason to suppose that some light shed on the worldview put forward by ancient Christians just might clarify one’s own.  The creed of survival of the loudest comes more from a perceived threat than from a reasoned position.  Bluntly, Bill Maher’s position is loud but, in fact, irrational.   

All of which appears to be very apocalyptic to me.  As Keener rightly points out “in the end, however, the frogs prove no match for God’s truth as a sword from the mouth of the Word made flesh.”

So croak on frogs.  We’ve heard it before and kingdom come is still here.