Critiquing Babylon

If I haven’t already been asked this question before, I am sure I will be asked it again: “Why are you reading… that?” Or, as I prepare to leave Chicago and head off to Seminary, I am already expecting the moment: we have our new friends over at our place, we’re enjoying a game of Carcassonne, and someone – one of the bookish ones – looks over my bookshelf as asks, with true curiosity and true concern, “Why is this on your shelf?”

As Christians, we have a set of authors that we tend to think as authoritative and representative of our beliefs and values. No one questions if you have Augustine, Luther, or Calvin on your shelf, even if they themselves are not really Augustinians or Lutherans or Calvinists. (I have all three, on that note.) But what do you do with that Christian friend (me) who on their shelf has names of an atheistic or even brutally anti-Christian bent, like Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, or Jean-Paul Sartre? Worse yet, what do you with that Christian friend who is not opposed to using those writers and thinkers to make a point? (For instance, my most recent blog posts have been, in no particular order, about Cicero, Sartre, and Foucault.)

If you look at my bookshelf, the level of blasphemy and heresy is pretty astounding. Nietzsche believes that man must make his own moral universe, Sartre believes that man is morally free to do anything (and he lived a life of that too), and Foucault says that every claim and revelation of truth is a manifestation of power and control (he’s not actually wrong; but there’s another essay to be written about how God’s truth doesn’t fit his paradigms). Marx looks at the face of capitalism and laughs, and conservative Christians think for that alone he is to never be read. Althusser (who I quote profusely) maintains that we are subjects by interpellation and, thus, maybe we shouldn’t be subjects at all (re: antihumanism). And the list goes deeper if I include the novels and literature on my shelf: Hesiod’s Theogony, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Beckett’s Molloy. Each of these reject, in their own way, the biblical claims and truths that I base and build my life upon. Why read them?

I’ve been enjoying this week a sermon series from a year ago at Door of Hope (the church that Josh White pastors) on the Book of Daniel. It’s a timely set of messages about how Daniel and his friends live faithfully even under the reign of Babylon, and the messages echo beautifully the Bible Study in Daniel that I led our small group through during the MAPH year. Daniel is a challenging and provocative book for academics: here we see that our call is not to remove ourselves from the learning process, but to invest even deeper and, yet, with faithfulness to the Lord. The tension isn’t between learning Babylonian languages and literatures (the Hebrew youths all receive [effectively] Ph.D.’s in Babylonian, according to Daniel 1) and serving the Lord; the tension is how one serves Babylon and serves the Lord simultaneously.

The great tension and arc of the Book of Daniel is the story of how Babylon thinks of itself in a hegemonic manner: it is all-powerful, it is an eternal kingdom, it is the world empire. The Lord, of course, rejects this notion altogether: He sends a dream to Nebuchadnezzar to remind the king that he is a part of a larger order of kingdoms, that his kingdom will not last, and, even moreso, that the Lord will bring a Kingdom that will never perish to destroy all the other kingdoms.

The reminder for the people of God is that Babylon will eventually crumble. And this is a great theme throughout Scriptures, where the eternal battle between two cities - Zion and Babylon - is continually and regularly waged. Babylon, "the world," Egypt, Rome, Tyre, Sodom and Gomorrah... these are all shorthands for the Tower of Babel, that power that men exerted in order to make themselves into gods. We know, according to Revelation, that Babylon will eventually fall destructively, and that all of Creation will rejoice when that happens; but for now Babylon still exists.

This brings me back to my atheists. The reason I love to read the atheists is because they are all particularly accomplished as critics of Babylon. Foucault critiques the power of Babylon, Marx the commodities of Babylon, Althusser the ideology of Babylon. For these writers their concern is first and foremost "there is something at work here that sets man's power over other men, and something about that manifesting power is dangerous and destructive." They are atheists, so they aren't interested in describing the eternal machinations of that power; instead they simply take their observations and describe the temporal machinations of Babylon.

This is incredibly useful for the Christian person. Provided that the arguments are coherent and follow a logical line of thought - and many of them do - then the Christian person is given a tool to observe the machinations and powers-that-be unveiled and defamiliarized, reified in some corporeal manner before themselves, so that the Christian person might be allowed to make a good judgment. Oftentimes the atheists refuse to make judgments - or when they do the judgments feel flat (Foucault in particular avoided doing this) - but Christians have access to Truth in some measure which allows us access, again in some measure, to good judgment.

So often we judge quickly or rashly and we do not consider the machinations of Babylon. Through reading these atheists, I have learned, little by little, how to avoid those quick judgments and how to uncover the powers that operate and then hold those powers to account in light of a Christian critique. This is how I operate as a Christian intellectual: I observe the critiques (from atheists and from Christians) of this-or-that manifestation of Babylon, and then I hold that manifestation up to the light of the Christian revelation. The combination of this tactic allows for a precise level of critique that I do not think most Christian writers today have demonstrated themselves able to do. This is a needed work: if we do not know how Babylon operates, how will we know whether or not we are bowing down to idols of gold made for its worship?

This, to put it quickly, is the value of Christian humanism, and, for my blog, the value of being a Christian mythologist.