Sunday, May 15, 2005
(10:48 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Abortion and Obscurantism
Forgive the Bible references on this Pentecost Sunday:"Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen" (I John 4:20)Throughout a semester of studying the New Testament Epistles, I have noticed a consistent anti-obscurantism. Reading Irenaeus's account of the beliefs of the Gnostics directly after a detailed study of those New Testament documents, I can see why early Christian leaders were at such pains to refute the Gnostic system of esoteric knowledge, harmless and amusing as it may seem on the surface -- the early Christian movement was a movement based on evidence, based on empiricism.
"How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?" (I John 3:17)
"What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?" (James 2:14-16)
At the core, of course, is the resurrection of Christ, foretaste of the redemption of the world, which modern science (not to say common sense) teaches us to regard as unbelievable. This resurrection takes place in secret, in the depths of a sealed tomb, in the middle of the night, where the guards are sleeping, just as the disciples were sleeping when they could have witnessed the complex negotiations between Christ and his Father in the Garden of Gethsemane. Yet in contrast with the esotericism of the Gnostics, this "supernatural event" does not become an object of speculation or concern in itself. No gospel writer dares to write an account of the process, and when Mary Magdalene bows down to worship the risen Christ, he bids her to go and declare what she has seen.
The gospel is a public proclamation, a counter-proclamation taking place within the concrete circumstances of Roman imperialism -- and it is a proclamation that leads not to claims of esoteric knowledge, not to "quarreling about opinions," but to actual concrete social practices. Paul sees the risen Christ, and he starts a mission, not to persuade people to assent to the opinion that Christ rose from the dead, but by calling people to join communities in which the promise of that resurrection is realized in the here and now, through the overcoming of cultural and religious difference. Not faith, shall we say, but faithfulness to Christ, a visible, actual faithfulness that inevitably puts Christ's adherents in contrast with the surrounding society -- not because contrast is good for its own sake, or because they believe arbitrary things that reasonable people reject as contradictory to experience, but because they are living real life, the life that everyone wants to live, right now, even as imperialism continues to warp and constrain the humanity of everyone it touches.
If "faithfulness is the evidence of things not seen," it is nonetheless evidence, the kind of thing that counts for evidence in every situation in which evidence is required -- evidence you can see and touch and even participate in yourself if you so choose. The resurrection of Christ and the future consummation are things not seen, but the evidence is not an internal assent; it is not an internal struggle to tame the pride of human intellect and submit one's rational nature to a necessary nonsense. It is evidence that is publicly available to everyone, because it bears first of all on life itself, the fullness of human life, and making sure that your brothers and sisters whom you see have what is necessary to participate fully in that human life.
Much has changed since then; perhaps we have become Gnostics of a certain sort, huddling in the church to worship the God whom we have not seen and to defend the bare life of the fetus whom we have not seen, even as we callously neglect the needs of our brothers and sisters, or else put ourselves in a safe suburban place so that we never have to see those needs at all. When it's bare life at either end of the spectrum -- the sheer persistent heartbeat of a woman who's been in a coma for fifteen years, the invisible division and growth of a clump of cells -- then it's the most important thing in the world. Then we are willing to sacrifice everything -- the rational administration of justice in the public sphere, the hope of collaborative solutions to our shared needs -- to appease the God of "life," whom we have never seen.
The pro-"life" movement is based on a knowledge that cannot be shared (either you "believe" that a fetus is a "person" or you do not); it has absolutely no future. It is an obscurantist dead-end, leading to nothing, to no improvement, to no hope. There is no thought to making this present world worth living in. Paired with the conviction that the most important life is that which cannot be seen and that the most important thing in life is "beliefs" about things that cannot be seen (which count as "faith" if they're stupid enough), is a disregard for this life, for the real human life that we have actually experienced and for which we all hold out an implicit hope, a submission of real human life to what is invisible, to what has no evidence supporting it whatsoever.
Pure escapism, and all the more insidious as its adherents convince themselves that they're preventing yet another Holocaust, even as their ignorance and blindness clears the path for ever more horrors. They associate their opponents with Nazis even as they ask the state to be concerned first of all with the direct regulation of bare life -- a task their political allies pair, naturally enough, with the destruction of the structures of our shared life, the virtual guarantee that justice will be ever more difficult to come by. Oh, and how the language of "sacrifice" sanctifies everything! Makes it holy, sets it apart in a realm into which rational criticism is not allowed, is in fact a blasphemous trespass. The true patriot -- the one who really cares about the country into which she was born and in which she has a genuine stake -- is the one who worships the invisible fetus, who fights for arbitrary public acknowledgement of the power of a God whose power she has never once witnessed, who goes through various ritual gestures of "support" for "troops" fighting in a country she has never seen. The one who cares about the administration of justice in the public sphere, who hopes to ensure that her fellow-citizens have access to adequate medical attention, who thinks that there is no moral lesson to be learned when one is deprived of basic necessities due to "fluxuations in the job market" -- that person is an enemy of the state. A liberal. A communist.
And so the resurrection becomes a fable. Who could "believe" it? Who could discipline and abuse her intellect sufficiently to assent to such a stupid thing? No one. As it stands, no one could possibly believe in such a stupid thing, and no one probably should. The question becomes: "Can these dry bones live?" It is possible that God has preserved a remnant, very possible -- we can probably point to those places where the resurrection does have some evidence to back it up. But perhaps it is God's judgment on his church that for now, we have very little to do with his mission -- perhaps the Holy Spirit has left us and is now moving among the secular humanists, and the liberals, and the gays, and the communists.
