Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Innocents
“Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not”
The aggressive atheist and neo-Darwinist, Richard Dawkins, argues that the God of the Old Testament is a most horrible character, to which the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks replied, much to Dawkins’ discomfort, “Ah, I see you are a Christian atheist.” The use of the term Old Testament for the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures is characteristic of the Christian understanding because of the New Testament writings.
Dawkins’ view of the Old Testament is not new and belongs to a common misconception of the relation between the Old and New Testament which overstates the differences and overplays the contrast. This is seen, for instance, in the idea of the Law versus Grace, forgetting that the Law as given by God is therefore also grace; or the similar idea of justice versus mercy or love, forgetting that mercy is just as intrinsic to the Hebrew Scriptures as it is to the New Testament. Overstating the contrasts between the two testaments belongs to a conflict narrative which pits Jew against Christian. In turn, the aggressive and naive atheism of Dawkins assumes the same conflict narrative between modern science and religion. Such is a profound distortion and misconception.
Dawkins has his precursors, ranging from Marcion in the 2nd century to Thomas Jefferson in the late 18th century. Marcion could not reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament and so conveniently edited out large swaths of the Old Testament and as well great chunks of the New Testament. For him the contrast was between love and judgement. It is a tendency that has infected many over the centuries. In the case of the 3rd President of America, Thomas Jefferson, the concern was about reason versus revelation, particularly the miracle stories of the Christian Gospels. Jefferson took his scissors to the New Testament to excise all such things leaving merely the husk of a kind of moralizing Jesus in accommodation to the precepts of human reason.
All such things reveal an attitude and a set of assumptions about God and human good. But surely, Dawkins could just have easily found the ‘Christian’ God of the New Testament equally repulsive simply in terms of this disturbing and disquieting story that is an essential part of the mystery of Christmas. If the martyrdom of St. Stephen was not enough of a wake-up call and shock to our thinking about the wondrous birth of Christ, we have the very shocking story of the slaughter to the little ones of Bethlehem, whom Herod slew in his fury, as the carol, puer nobis nascitur puts it.
