April 11, 2016
IT'S JUST A QUESTION OF WHETHER HE GOT WHERE HE WAS HEADED IN TIME:
The Faith of Christopher Hitchens : Contrarian to the end? : a review of The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World's Most Notorious Atheist by Larry Alex Taunton (Douglas Wilson, Christianity Today)Taunton exhibits a real affection for Christopher as a man, leaves certain things unaddressed for specified reasons, refuses to airbrush out the marked blemishes he does address, and does everything in the light of the gospel of grace. Fewer things are sadder than the death of a defiant atheist, without hope and without God in the world, and yet Larry Taunton tells this melancholy story wonderfully, with truth in his right hand and hope in his left. I can't imagine anyone doing this better.
The observations that Taunton makes about Christopher's "relationship" to God are dependent on two basic facts--one psychological and the other biographical or historical. The psychological one is the open pride that Christopher took in keeping "two sets of books"--one for his public life and the other for his private life. So let's begin with that.
Taunton dedicates a separate chapter to the theme of these "two sets of books." One of Hitchens' published works was entitled Letters to a Young Contrarian, and the contrarian streak in him is generally well known. That much is expected. It goes without saying that Hitchens would be a contrarian toward whatever he thought were the "smelly little orthodoxies" that Orwell once wrote about. He could outrage the faithful by attacking Mother Teresa, to take one famous example. But he could also from time to time keep the orthodox unbelievers on his own team off balance.
Taunton discusses, for example, an essay entitled "When the King Saved God," in which Hitchens extravagantly praised the King James Version of the Bible--"he loves the language of the Tyndale and King James translations, and loathes any attempts at modernizing it." (p. 32). As it happens, as one who loves the King James myself, after that piece appeared, I wrote Christopher and thanked him for it. He wrote back, "I'm so pleased that you liked it. There are gold standards, and they hold their value." This was the predictable contrarian--an atheist praising the King James Version of the Bible. Take that.
But (keeping the idea of two books in mind) Hitchens was also a contrarian to himself. His public persona was contradicting the conventional views he found all around him, conventional believers and unbelievers both, but that public persona was also contradicting a much more reflective Christopher, one who was considering certain ultimate questions much more carefully than he could afford to let on. As Peter Hitchens once told me, the reason Christopher's city walls were so heavily armed, bristling with weaponry, was that if you ever got past those walls there were no defenses from there to the city center.
So the biographical element has to do with two dramatic turnings in his life. There were (of course) inconsistencies and contradictions associated with these turnings, but they were still highly visible for all that. The first was his turn away from the political left in the aftermath of 9/11, and his resultant and very public support for George Bush and the "war on terror." This resulted in Christopher being thrust out of his leftist bubble, whereupon he discovered that not all conservatives were idiots. They had better not be, since Christopher was associated with them now.
The second turning followed his publication of God Is Not Great, his famous anti-religion screed. Christopher, to his credit, asked his publicist to arrange for the publicity tour for the book to be one in which he took on all comers in debate. Rather than release the book at some Manhattan soirée, the kind of event that is sufficiently godless already, Christopher issued a challenge saying that he would debate anybody who wanted to debate him. This is how Taunton came to meet Christopher--having arranged a debate between him and John Lennox. Later on Taunton himself came to debate him, and acquitted himself quite well in it. But how is it a "turning" when a notorious atheist simply continues on with his atheism, throwing down the gauntlet for believers to pick up? How is an atheist publishing an atheist rant a turning?
One of the things that Taunton's book makes very clear is that Christopher issued this challenge with mixed motives. One was for the sake of the debates themselves, the kind of event that Christopher "liked having," and that part was plain enough to everyone. But the other motive was that it enabled him to associate with Christians in a way that would simply be impossible otherwise. If you are the enfant terrible of atheism, you can't just start going to Bible studies. It would arouse comment. Your atheist fan club would go sideways. In fact, as The Faith of Christopher Hitchens makes clear, Christopher had to do a lot of explaining even with the ingenious cover he had.
The New Atheists have done so uniformly badly in these debates as to raise the question of whether their case is just that weak or are they double agents, or both?
Posted by Orrin Judd at April 11, 2016 4:57 PM