ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?

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?

THE FEAST OF STEPHEN (a couple of days late)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)

A friend sent me some thoughts on St Stephen, the first martyr, celebrated the day after Christmas. Here is my reply:

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” This is an old, old proverb, and it shows us how close old Christianity was in some ways to current (I erased “modern”) Islam. A “màrtys” in Greek is a witness: originally in a secular sense, later someone who testified to a religious truth. And in controversial situations, one who held nothing back, who was ready to affirm his faith out loud even when facing the barrel of a gun or a team of torturers. There have been martyrs, in this sense, in my lifetime: Dietrich Bonhoeffer for instance, one of the leading lights of Nazi Germany’s “Confessing Church”, a church that opted to speak out against the barbarity: a deeply civilised man who wrote some lasting texts of faith and was hanged with piano wire. And, of course, anyone willing to die for his faith tends mightily to impress bystanders.

On the other hand, said Oscar Wilde, “an idea is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.” This statement, true in itself, is also deliberately provocative and thus a lie on another level. But in today’s Western world, the idea of the martyr is seriously uncomfortable. It smacks of hysteria, of over-dramatization, of Cecil B. DeMille, or alternatively of bearded Muslim fanatics with explosive vests.

So what do we do with Stephen? He was not subtle. He was all of a piece, a good speaker, and spoke out when it was a damn fool thing to do. And he was stoned to death for it, which is not a pretty way to go. (Google it and see some horrid things.) I can’t really write about this, as I have not (and I thank God for it) have been in such a situation, and know not what I should do if I got there. I have dire suspicions about myself.  So in one sense, obviously, I admire the ones who find themselves in the situation and have the courage.  

But if life has denied us Stephen’s fate (at least so far), what conclusions can a meditation on martyrdom lead to? One: it is a healthy church consensus that it must never be sought. If it happens, if the person facing the situation has the courage to persevere and die for the cause, well and good; but my own feeling is that while it can be an inspiration if it happens, it should not in itself and for itself be glorified.

Secondly, the Church has another interpretation, beyond the simple story. For the Church, the Feast of Stephen, coming directly after the Nativity, is a bridge upon which to look forward already to Easter. A reminder that birth leads to death, but that death leads to resurrection. For what we have not mentioned, so far, is what Stephen spoke out about, what he witnessed to. And that, of course, is the Risen Christ.

So the Feast of Stephen is a celebration of witnessing, of carrying the story of the Resurrection out into an unbelieving world. In 1615, in 1715, in 1815, this would have chiefly meant taking ship for unknown parts and preaching to “natives”; for the world at home was one in which every village had a church (sometimes two) and every church had a priest or minister. Now, however, the unbelieving world is all around us. It may not stone us if we talk about the Risen Christ, but it is quite likely to turn away in vague irritation and wonder if we have gone a little soft in the head.

Moreover, this same unbelieving world is periodically assailed by strident “witnesses” who purport to proclaim the Risen Christ but do so in loud, tactless and simplistic ways. They make a number of converts, but for every convert they make they alienate one or two other listeners, some definitively. Perhaps a modern Stephen in the Western world is well advised to learn what the Church calls “discernment”: the application of (prayerful) intelligence and tact to faith and its situations.