I have been looking up the ungodly. Not, initially, in the physical or
social sense: they are all around us and we will get to them presently. No: in the linguistic sense. Since I have
been reading the Psalms a good deal lately, I realise that there too they are
everywhere. So I wanted to find out what the Hebrew term was, and then what was
its Greek equivalent in the New Testament.
The Hebrew term, I find, is rasha, with the a’s pronounced as “ah”. And it’s a strong term,
meaning ‘guilty’ or ‘wicked’. So ancient Israel did not beat about the bush, so
to speak: the opposite of the chasid
or godly person is not just somebody who doesn’t believe in the Deity but a
guilty or wicked man.
If we read the Psalms, it is not hard – especially from
Psalm 119 – to find out what a chasid
is. He is someone who loves the Law and obeys it: the Law in all its glorious
intricacies, the Law that provides the parched traveller, lost in the spiritual Negev or Nefud desert, with a path that if followed will inevitably lead him to a
well and even to an oasis. The path was made and given by God: man’s job is to
find it, follow it and learn it by heart. That is the way to God. The holy man
is also the righteous man, who abstains from evil deeds and succours the
defenceless; if he is so, then God’s favour will uphold and follow him. His granaries
will be full, his wife and children will be as green olive trees, and he will
not eat a morsel or drink a drop without giving thanks – Baruch atta Adonai Elohenu . . . .
His opposite is not the decent man who just doesn’t believe
in God: his opposite is the evil man, the one who robs widows and children of
their savings, who says “Tush, God will not see it” and cheerfully enriches
himself without a smidgen of charity, and who, as the Psalm wonderfully says
“grins like a dog and runs about the city”.
In the New Testament, where Greek takes the place of Hebrew,
there is a significant change. The “ungodly” now is the asebès, the man who will not venerate, will not be respectful, will
not “hallow” the holy. Not actively wicked, he is the one who shrugs. He
reminds me of the Athenians who listened politely to Paul on the Unknown God
and said, “Hmmm. Interesting. Come back some other time.” To the asebès, all gods are sort of equal,
equally interesting, equally boring in the long run, equally irrational and
thus quaint but unimportant.
Today’s ungodly are more like the Greeks. They tend to say,
when asked, that yes they believe in some sort of higher power as long as they
can think of feeling it on a mountaintop at sunrise; but above all never, never in a church; not in a church,
not in any sort of group, not in the context of any kind of intellectual
definition or spiritual rigour, not in a tradition of thinkers, not in any
context that would bind or constrain them in any way at all. Moreover, a number of them, reacting to
militant Islam in a carefully non-discriminating way, proclaim the idea that all religion is not just slightly
irritating but positively harmful.
While our very modern and rhetorically evangelising churches
keep telling us that we must be active witnesses, encountering today’s
ubiquitous ungodly is a challenge neither St Paul nor Luther ever had
to face. Paul did better with Jews than with Athenians; Luther convinced many
members of a degenerate Catholic Church. And we? We are often told (by our own
churches) that as long as we live a life of clear and evident faith, that will
interest and intrigue people enough to start a conversation. In my own
experience this is mostly untrue: people note that Dwight is religious, in the
same way that Beatrice does crosswords and Charles collects old absinthe
bottles, and move on.
The not-very-satisfactory provisional solution is to keep a
keen ear open for the opportunities that
do sometimes arise in conversation, and to keep one’s private feelings about
today’s asebèsis firmly to
oneself. One point I have sometimes made
is a modern version of Pascal’s Wager. “Look around you at the people you
know,” I suggest: “Do you on the whole think those who do not believe in God
are happier than those who do?” That sometimes makes people stop and think. But
the problem is huge, and remains. How does one make inroads on a culture, not
of anger or persecution but of complete indifference?
