More on the Cardinal Pell/ Richard Dawkin's Debate

Some debate is going on at The Corner at National  Review about my post concerning the debate between Cardinal Pell and Richard Dawkins.

Michael Potemra wrote in response Mark Steyn's agreement with my post:

April 12, 2012 5:22 A.M. Comments 1 Mark, I think the blogger you cite is rather too hard on Cardinal Pell. She chides him for “letting Dawkins’ hideous view of God and Christ’s sacrifice frame the beginning of the debate.” First of all, it’s not at all clear to me that Dawkins’s opening statement did, in fact, frame the debate from that point on. (On almost all of the issues in the rest of the hour, Pell gave as good as he got.) Second, and more important, Dawkins’s presentation of the idea of substitutionary atonement — what the blogger calls Dawkins’s “hideous view” of it — is exactly what St. Paul told us to expect: The Cross is indeed folly to the Greeks (I Cor. 1:23), and nobody can believe such things unless granted the gift of faith by God (John 6:44). Dawkins is merely expressing what seems commonsensical to what Paul called “the natural man” (I Cor. 2:14), and if you can disprove it in a 45-second on-the-spot response on a TV show, you’re a better man than I. (The format problem that Mark mentioned also played a part in Pell’s non-response on that issue. This particular show is driven by audience questions. Instead of attacking Dawkins’s statement on the atonement, Pell chose to answer the actual question the audience member had asked.) The blogger phrases her overall criticism of Pell’s approach as follows: He let “the whole debate [take] place within the worldview of Dawkins.” But to get people to change their worldview, it really helps if you can show them that you understand theirworldview on its own terms, which is what Pell was doing. (I also think it’s what Paul meant when he once said he was all things to all men, I Cor. 9:22.) There is a place for straightforward proclamation of the Christian Gospel, but there is also a need (both personal and apologetic) for intellectual engagement with opposing worldviews.

Here's what Dawkin's said, according to the ABC transcript about the Atonement, which I found hideous (my emphases):

Now, as for getting your morals from the Bible, I very sincerely hope nobody does get their morals from the Bible. It’s true that you can find the occasional good verse and the Sermon on the Mount would be one example, but it’s lost amid the awful things that are dotted throughout the Old Testament and actually throughout the New Testament as well because the idea - the fundamental idea of New Testament Christianity, which is that Jesus is the son of God who is redeeming humanity from original sin, the idea that we are born in sin and the only way we can be redeemed from sin is through the death of Jesus, I mean that’s a horrible idea. It’s a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our since sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself. 

Potemra says: "the idea of substitutionary atonement — what the blogger calls Dawkins’s “hideous view” of it — is exactly what St. Paul told us to expect."


I have no problem with the substitutionary or penal view of the atonement as one perspective on this mystery. It is, of course, Scriptural.  But when it is reduced to being the only view of the atonement, I might as well turn to Chick Comics for my theology. When this penal view is  used as the sole explanation, it seems to imply a wrathful vengeful God interested  only in punishment and a division among the wills of the Persons of the Trinity.  It misses the point of a loving God, who, sends His Son, who is also God the Son in the Holy Trinity in perfect agreement with God the Father in that communion of divine love, to take our nature upon Him and suffer death upon the Cross to free us from the bonds of sin and death.  The Dawkin's parody of the perfect meeting of justice and mercy on the Cross is exactly what Paul told us to expect in terms of the disgust and ridicule Dawkin's expressed, so in that Potemra is right.  But I wish it had been challenged.


I wish Cardinal Pell had not read his audience so well and allowed the debate to take place totally within the natural man's frame of mind, which, it is true, finds the Cross a stench of death, a stumbling block, an offense.  He did well enough in the dastardly format, but I would have preferred he left my heart burning within me as if I were in the Road to Emmaus, even if he ended up looking foolish to his audience.  Some souls might have been saved, no?  Otherwise, those who already believe may have a few more arguments in their apologetics arsenal or atheists might have been comforted by the Cardinal's remarks that they aren't all destined for Hell.


  As Vineyard Movement founder John Wimber used to say, "I'm a fool for Christ. Whose fool are you?"  I wish Cardinal Pell had been as bold about the Good News as he was about Transubstantiation. Christ's gift of Himself in the Mass cannot be separated from His Death on the Cross and the  Good News of our Salvation.  


In my last interview with Cardinal Ouellet he said he was looking for this in bishops (my emphases):

A bishop has to lead the community, so he needs a deep supernatural vision as well as the capacity to assess the political, cultural, and sociological context, said the new Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops in an interview. Above all, a bishop must be “audacious in proposing the Word and in believing in the Power of the Word and the power of the Spirit.”

“We have to dare to speak to the deep heart, where the Spirit of the Lord is touching people beyond what we can calculate,” said Ouellet. “We need spiritual discernment and not just political calculation of the risk of the possibility of the message being received.”

There has also been much debate in places about Cardinal Pell's views on the story of the Adam and Eve and the Fall.


He said:

GEORGE PELL: Well, Adam and Eve are terms - what do they mean: life and earth. It’s like every man. That’s a beautiful, sophisticated, mythological account. It’s not science but it’s there to tell us two or three things. First of all that God created the world and the universe. Secondly, that the key to the whole of universe, the really significant thing, are humans and, thirdly, it is a very sophisticated mythology to try to explain the evil and suffering in the world.
TONY JONES: But it isn’t a literal truth. You shouldn't see it in any way as being an historical or literal truth?
GEORGE PELL: It’s certainly not a scientific truth and it’s a religious story told for religious purposes.
TONY JONES: Just quickly, because the Old Testament in particular is full of these kind of stories, I mean is there a point where you distinguish between metaphor and reality? For example, Moses receiving the Ten Commandments inscribed directly by God on a mountain? 
GEORGE PELL: I’m not sure that the Old Testament says that God inscribed the Ten Commandments but leaving that aside it’s difficult to know how exactly that worked but Moses was a great man. There was a great encounter with the divine. Actually, with Moses we get the key that enables us to come together with the Greeks with reason because Moses said who will I tell the Egyptians and he tell that my name is "I am who I am".
TONY JONES: Okay, I’m just going to...
GEORGE PELL: And we’ll come back to that.
TONY JONES: I’m just going to bring Richard Dawkins back in here because we’ve moved from evolution obviously to the biblical versions of it. Your response.
RICHARD DAWKINS: Well, I’m curious to know if Adam and Eve never existed where did original sin come from? But I also would like to clarify the point about whether there was ever a first human. 

++++++


I think Dawkin's question at the end is a good one.  If no Adam and Eve---and note that Pell did not say they never existed, just that the story of the Fall is layered with meaning on many levels and not just a straight historical or scientific treatise---no Fall.  And if no Fall, why the need for a Redeemer?


An interesting discussion as ensued in the comments section on Father Z's blog on Pell's take on Adam and  Eve.  Some examples:

AGA says:11 April 2012 at 4:50 pmFr. Fox, Dawkins understood well the implications of Cardinal Pell’s ambiguous description of the Creation narrative. Original Sin, if it is going to have any real meaning, is dependent on the Creation account being true. Otherwise, Original Sin is relegated to allegory too. Beyond Original Sin there were several other errors generated by Cardinal Pell’s conservatively modern understanding of theology. For instance, when he opens the door to the possibility that evolution can explain the existence of the human race, it eventually led to his being unable to adequately explain the Resurrection. If God did not create Adam and Eve directly, then how will He resurrect us? Dawkins understood this and was quick to exploit the connection as soon as the cardinal opened the door. If God used evolution to bring about humanity, then will He use a form of evolution to recreate our bodies at the End of Time?

Centristian says:11 April 2012 at 9:02 pmIf there were not an Adam and an Eve…if they are merely some sort of a device, a story told for religious purposes, and if modern man genuinely did evolve from primitive man, it really does shake faith in the dogma of Original Sin, and thereby faith in the whole kit and kaboodle. It seems rather unfathomable to me that a primitive form of man with his limited capacities could have been held responsible by the Almighty to the point of devastating the condition of all mankind throughout history for whatever disobedience it may have been that he, in his dull, grunting state of being, might have committed.

Me?  I believe both what Pell said about the story AND that we had original parents, Adam and Eve.  The catechism is pretty definitive on the importance of our believing in our original parents.  And we can get into dangerous biological determinism views that fuel racism if we believe different races evolved from various different monkey origins. 


I have problems with attempts to marry theology with scientific accounts of evolution because evolution implies progress and natural selection helping us get better all the time.  Where is the Fall, how could we have fallen, if we are constantly improving from amoeba to ape to  human being as in that Beatles' song?  If we're always improving, why so much guilt? Why such bondage to sin?


While reason and faith are compatible, faith must not jump the gun, as it were, and surrender revelation to the latest theories of science or modernist worldviews, but investigate and think and ponder, always remembering God's ways are not our ways, and this world we perceive through our senses is not all there is to reality.


And if evolution trumps Revelation and nature has always been red in tooth and claw, then death has always been part of creation and everything about the Christian story is pious nonsense.


But I know it isn't.