Dissent

God has been through a very rough patch over the last 500 years. Once the Creator and Ruler of the universe, He fell into a long and precipitous decline with the advent of modernity. Dethroned as Ruler in the North Atlantic by religious tolerance and democracy, the Almighty watched helplessly as science refuted His claim to be the Creator. Historians, archeologists, and literary scholars broke the spell of His holy books, impugning their inerrancy and exposing them as riven by myths, errors, and contradictions. Add popular education, material prosperity, and longevity extended by better diet and medicine, and God’s hold on the moral and metaphysical imagination grew ever more attenuated.

The itinerant and crucified Jesus, not his Dad, is the apotheosis of Eagleton’s political theology. To the curer of leprosy and blindness, pain and disease are “unacceptable”; misery and despair are not “enviable opportunities to flex one’s moral muscles.” Jesus mends without compensation or moral inquiry; he never tells the afflicted to learn the edifying lessons the Almighty is teaching them, however inscrutably. If there must be suffering, it comes as the price of personal and collective transfiguration; our condition is so awry that the only way out is through a turbulent journey of self-dispossession. As Eagleton explains, the Christian life as portrayed in the Gospels is not that of the pious, hard-working, familial accumulator dear to the conceits of suburban believers. It is rather “homeless, propertyless, peripatetic, celibate, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, averse to material possessions … a thorn in the side of the Establishment and a scourge of the rich and powerful.”