A reply to Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre McCloskey was kind enough to read the blog and write a nicely reasoned response to one of my earlier posts. She may well be right and anyone who drops by can decide for themselves. You can find her comment if you scroll down at this post.

That said, I still disagree.

Her first point is absolutely correct. Given the kind of book she wrote and her intended audience, it is absolutely correct to acknowledge "that all my readers are not Christians, and therefore not all of them will accept that God is love". But McCloskey is doing more than that. Let's return to the bit I cited before (with emphasis added):

Love, charity, caritas, agape is the greatest virtue of the three theological virtues in Christianity because it is the essence of the Christian God, so unlike his predecessors, at any rate in his opinion.

A Christian is someone who believes in the Christian God. Who believes that God is God. That passage doesn't just say that the writer respects the right of others to disagree. It also says more than that we Christians sometimes exaggerate the uniqueness of some claims that have been made on behalf of our faith. That passage says that the Christian God himself is mistaken about himself.

It's a perfectly reasonable argument for anyone to make. Just as it is perfectly reasonable for me (hypothetically) to argue that all prices should be set by a government committee. But if I did argue that, others would quite within their rights to wonder if I was still a libertarian.

It is possible and reasonable*, by the way, to argue that the words and motives of God as reported in the Bible reflect the understandings, hopes and prejudices of the people who wrote particular Bible texts. I, for one, very much doubt that God withdrew his favour from Saul because Saul didn't commit genocide against the Amalekites. I suspect that this text, written and redacted by people who had experienced the Assyrian invasion, amongst others, reflects the desperate desire for justice of a people who live in constant terror of violent invasion and is driven by a yearning for God but not the intention of God himself.

But note that I explained my reservations without attacking God himself. I think that is a big and important difference.

The second big point McCloskey raises is a subtle and complex one. She says she is:

"acknowledging what even a slightly sophisticated biblical student understands, that Christians (starting it appears, with Jesus himself but certainly including the writers of the Gospels) mined the Hebrew Bible (called so by people who do not want to insult the Jews by calling their book the "old" testament) for anticipations of the coming of Christ, especially for example the book of Isaiah."

I think the implication of her words "what even a slightly sophisticated biblical student understands" is that the view she is pushing is an established and respected one in biblical scholarship. I am sure that there is no veiled ad hominem hiding here. In any case, she is right, this interpretation is a respected view in scholarship. But is it what a committed Christian should be saying?

Lets consider a non-biblical story. There is well-worn anecdote about some Wall Street titan avoiding the consequences of the 1929 crash because he heard someone talking up stock tips, I think it might have been the man who shined his shoes but can't remember exactly. Anyway, the point is that he took this as a sign that market was no longer driven by anything vaguely resembling rationality and bailed out.

True? Hard to say. But let's suppose it is and let's imagine I was hanging around in October 1929 and I saw that guy get his shoes shined and overheard that conversation. If I were a journalist, I might even have gone and written the story out and published it. But my purpose, would not have been his. My story would more likely have been some human-interest piece about a Wall Street financial whiz trading tips with a guy who shines shoes. In a sense , it is the same story but what the story signified, would be entirely different.

Okay, now let's take it another step. Imagine, the titan never left his office. He read the my story in the paper and reached the conclusion that it was time to get out of the market. He does this even though my intent in writing the story and the facts I marshaled to tell it were actually meant to make a different point. We might say, he saw the real point of the story which I missed even though I wrote it. Someone smarter than me can look at a story I wrote and conclude, based on their deeper understanding of human life that I missed the point; that the real significance is elsewhere than where I found it.

Lets' replace the titan with Jesus and the story with Isaiah. Christians believe in Jesus. Christianity is not just a belief that this guy Jesus showed up and said and did inspirational stuff. It is a claim that this guy Jesus showed up because it was part of God's plan that he show up and that, further, this guy Jesus is God made man. Without insulting anyone else, we can say that we believe that when Jesus interpreted scripture, he saw the real point of the story even if that point differs from what the people who wrote and preserved the story thought it was about.

We can't really honour others right to differ from us if we think that the only way to do that is to not actually say what we believe in the first place.





*Reasonable and possible for me as a Catholic and it would also be reasonable and possible for McCloskey as an Episcopalian. If I were a member of a group that held that the Bible is a scrupulously accurate account of both history and of God's will, I'd be kicking myself out of that club by saying something like that.