Wilson on Hitchens: The Christianity Today Obituary
Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 10:11AM | by Otter Here’s the Christianity Today obituary for Christopher Hitchens. The title is “Christopher Hitchens Has Died, Douglas Wilson Reflects.” Like most journals’ obituaries, it has all the marks of having been prepared in advance, which is common practice.
The subtitle, though, is, “How To Think about the Death of the Outspoken Atheist,” which points to a necessary didactic paternalism that evangelical Christianity suffers from: there are thinking people around here, and yesterday saw an explosion of predictable Hitchensmania by those thinking people. By evangelicalism’s theology (which has an uneasy relationship to thinking simply because it relies on the idea that God reveals what thought does not reveal) the man must be in hell, and this means that his death is an occasion of some gravity. It’s no accident that Doug Wilson also provided a video blog guide to thinking about Hitchens’ death in which he declares flatly that Hitchens’ death is an occasion to proclaim the gospel: he and CT see this as a pastoral occasion in which they reinforce the group’s orthodoxy about hell and redemption. Everything is such an occassion. Everything has to be, as Hitchens would probably be the first to admit: if you’re right about hell, you should say so. (He’d quickly add that you’re not right, or if you are it’s appalling.) But the flock needs to know what its own intellectuals make of this stuff so it can feel secure about what to say.
Hostile readers will scorn this, of course, and I’m tempted to do so myself.
Still, we live in an age bordering on intellectual chaos: CT sets the candle out for the faithful to see by because according to their theology, eternity is at stake: so rightly or wrongly, there it is.
Douglas Wilson: Narrow But Sharp.Douglas Wilson is a good choice to provide a little light (?), as he debated Hitchens on several occasions both in print and in recorded sessions. He’s no idiot (his bizarre views on American slavery excepted), a proponent of classical Christian education, and unlike many of Hitchens’ interlocutors, he doesn’t shift away from the implications of evangelical theism: that denial of Christian tenets preps the soul for damnation. He is in the confident Reformed epistemological tradition of Cornelius van Til, who held that knowledge is impossible without special revelation. (While this position is fun to study and exciting if you believe in it, after a while it gets to be the theological equivalent of having an insurance salesman in your home.)
As for his obituary, I think it’s perceptive and disturbing at the same time. It does what true Christian belief must always do: kills the man to save the man from himself:
[Hitchens] was afraid of letting down the infidel team. In a number of interviews during the course of his cancer treatments, he discussed the prospect of a “death bed” conversion, and it was clear that he was concerned about the prospect. But, he assured interviewers, if anything like that ever happened, we should all be certain that the cancer or the chemo orsomething had gotten to his brain. If he confessed faith, then he, the Christopher Hitchens that we all knew, should be counted as already dead.
In short, he was preparing a narrative for us, just in case. But it is interesting that the narrative he prepped us with did not involve some ethically challenged evangelical nurses on the late shift who were ready to claim that they had heard him cry out to God, thus misrepresenting another great infidel into heaven. It has been done with Einstein, and with Darwin. Why not Hitchens? But Christopher actually prepared us by saying that if he said anything like this, then he did not know what he was saying.
In other words, Hitchens would have to become a new man to become saved, and the unregenerate Hitchens has put a poison pill in any conversion-narrative. Which Hitchens would be the “real” Hitchens?
I think that these remarks in CT will outrage Hitchens’ fans, but I think their rage will be misplaced. After all, a conversion of any sort, to atheism or Christianity, involves a death to the self you’ve been (or, if you prefer it, a liberation from the darkness you were in). The person you are when you renounce a faith in god or the sufficiency of reason or whatever cannot really comprehend the person you are when you embrace that faith.
It’s being born again, either way; and the only continuation of the self is like that which the acorn has to the oak.
Credit Wilson for this: he preserves intact the scandal of Christianity. If he’s right about hell, he’s right to say so, and if he’s right about redemption and repentance, then he’s right to say that too.
But give credit too to Hitchens for perceiving also that to change the mind is to change the self, at least if you really believe what you’re saying. You can’t embrace what you’ve rejected without a change of mind.
Kind of an adventure being human that way.
If you (like me) don’t share Wilson’s confidence in his interpretations of the Bible or its authority to speak finally on such things, then his public response to Hitchens’ death is (not “seems”) opportunistic and cold. Maybe even a little inhuman and cruel, getting in the last word in a debate that Hitchens cannot answer. That’s the prerogative of evangelicalism, or so it believes: it comments from the eternal perspective. I think it’s obscene.
Wilson has not so far shown with his eloquent Reformed apologetics that he is right to take Hitchens’ death as a chance to reinforce the intolerance of damnation, though he’s articulated wonderfully the consequences if he is right: in the all-or-nothing game of evangelicalism, Hitchens loses catastrophically if God truly is as Wilson imagines him.
Is that god great?
Otter
Douglas Wilson is taking on the Kinsey Institute. The blurb reads that he’s bringing “sexual sanity” to the Indiana University campus where the Institute is housed.
Reader Comments (4)
It’s interesting to see Hitchens and Wilson linked together in this way, because the broad strokes of their personalities affect me so similarly: I want to benefit from the crazy-smart thinking, but find I just can’t stomach the arrogant-jerkiness that accompanies it. (Not only do they both come across as arrogant jerks, but they both seem to get off on being jerks. Hitchens’s brand of arrogant-jerkiness reminds me of a couple of boys I knew in the “talented and gifted” program in sixth grade who thought the best use they could make of their smarts was to get laughs at the expense of their slower-witted classmates, while Wilson’s brand is more the sanctimonious type, but apart from that, there’s not much to choose between them.)
So, I can empathize with the fact that Wilson gets under your skin but I find your admiration of Hitchens hard to relate to . . . especially if we are critiquing the practice of using an obit as a platform for airing one’s own ideology. Hitchens’s obit of Jerry Falwell begins, “The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance, except perhaps for two categories of the species labeled ‘credulous idiot.’” It ends, “It's a shame that there is no hell for Falwell to go to.” Opportunistic? Cold? Obscene? Or just straight shooting from a no-holds-barred kinda guy?
Brad Warthen used to write for our local paper, before that paper took a look at the economy and started giving people the axe. His summative comment, written from the point of view of a cradle-Protestant now PV2-Catholic, was:
"I wish him the best in the life he did not expect."
Read the full (short) note here http://bradwarthen.com/?p=13954 and feel free to follow the comboxes.
Izzy, doesn't it seem a little weird to you that Warthen would have found a deathbed conversion "cheap theatrics" and that it would have "sent the wrong message"?
Do ALL Christians, like Warthen and Wilson, see Hitchens' death in terms of its relevance for their "message"?
Or just those whose names end in "W"?
(Warfield? Wesley? Wilberforce?)
The question is rhetorical: of course they do, and Hitchens invited it.
I still think it's incredibly tiresome and trivializing.
Susan,
I think Hitchens was totally out of bounds in those comments, but there is one point I'd like to make.
There was a rhetorical barb hidden (?) in the style of his post-mortem of Falwell: that is, that for Hitchens, there is no Falwell anymore. For Hitchens, we who are alive are left with the fallout of Jerry Falwell's life, and that's all that really matters. He himself is gone, and sucks to be him, but there's nothing to be done but assess whether his presence on the planet was good or bad. By unreservedly (and impolitely) saying "Bad," Hitchens emphasized that the evil men do lives after them, and making the moral point that Falwell's soul-fixation cultivated an inattention to his own activities' evil. Falwell's faith therefore doubled down on his badness.
If I'm right about that, we can take the point or leave it. But I think that Hitchens used shocking language to get an unspoken dig in at the distraction of eternity. I'm not unreservedly a Hitchens worshiper, nor will I defend what I think he did, but that's what I think he did.
If Wilson and company were to follow this logic, they would follow it to its logical conclusions and say unreservevdly, "Hitchens was bad for the planet," and leave it at that. They might or might not add, "And good riddance."
It's a credit to their charity maybe that they do not do so: after all, they believe that the tragedy of Hitchens' death probably continues into eternity. But the gravity of that tragedy makes it necessary for them to treat him as though he is a broken person still among us.
That's the weird charity and tyranny of heaven and hell.