Richard Beck is brilliant again: The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity

"Waste no more time arguing about what a decent man should be. Be one." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

I was reminded of that quote when I read Richard Beck's absolutely illuminating essay, The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity. Beck uses the phenomenon known as the "church lunch crowd," describing it as "the most well-dressed, entitled, dismissive, haughty and cheap collection of Christians ever seen on the face of the earth."

Beck's core argument is simple: modern Christianity has this program called "working on my relationship to God" that is a substitute for Jesus's program on Earth: love one another. Be a decent human being. "Work on your relationship with God by being an exemplary human being." Rather than be a decent human being, you can pat yourself on the back for your Christian adherence to the program: "Go to church," "Read the bible," "Argue with evolutionists," "Home-school your kids," "Don't read Harry Potter," and many, many more!

Beck is a Christian (although certainly a liberal, even radical one-- he became a Universalist a while back, convinced that, in the end, everyone gets into heaven, it's only a matter of time), so he knows of what he speaks. But I know Jews, Muslims, and even Buddhists who also regularly "work on their relationship with God/Allah/whatever" but who cling nonetheless to a retributional, coercive, cruel and unrelenting view of their responsibility as a member of their tribe.

The nice thing about atheism is there's no such program to latch on to. If you're an asshole, you get to take full responsibility.

Euthyphro reads the Bible

Beck has another interesting article that touches on a subject that has been buzzing around in my head for some time. In a review of Christian Smith's book, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, he writes:

[The main idea is that] the meaning of the bible is clear and transparent to open-minded readers. The implication of this idea is that when people sit down to read the bible a broad consensus can be reached about the will of God for any number of issues or topics.

Empirically speaking, the bible does not produce consensus. Empirically speaking, what we find, to use Smith's phrase, is "pervasive interpretive pluralism." Even among biblicists themselves consensus cannot be reached.

Smith's take is to tell people to get comfortable with ambiguity, to accept that the Bible is a mess, but just as you can't make out what one man in a crowd at a football stadium is screaming, you know that he and the crowd together are rooting for their team. Smith says that the Bible is "pointing to" God, and you'll just have to accept that the people who wrote the book made of hash of getting their story straight.

Beck doesn't have a take, except to say that Smith's is a recipe for madness and despair. But here's the one point that bothers me: if Smith is right, where is goodness in the Bible? How does one read it in order to "be a decent person," the take of Beck's other essays? Indeed, the entire question of Biblical interpretation is nothing more than Euthyphro's dilemma writ small: Can you take up the Bible and, from it, learn how to be a decent person? Or do you have to come to the Bible as a decent person first, and take from only those parts that edify and enlighten your quest for decency and dignity? If the latter, why need the Bible at all?

I have long suspected that the latter is the case. Smith seems to think so.