Tuesday 29 March 2011

On Being an Atheist Christian

Doing some reading with respect to this: and taking the prompts from this fascinating post by Brad Johnson, of An Und Fur Sich. My immediate thought is: Johnson's position (and judging by the comments thread, the positions of various other people) is that they are 'atheist Christians' in the sense that their belief in a transcendental divine principle underpinning the legitimacy and orthodoxy of their religion is, shall we say, on the continuum from complicated to nonexistent, but they are still members of their church, they still see merit and positive potential in being part of that community. That makes a lot of sense to me; but it's not what I'm interested in arguing myself. It's the being part of a community, defined by commonality and tradition, that seems to me radically Unchristian, not the belief of nonbelief in a transcendental God. Still Johnson very usefully points me to: Thomas Altizer’s Genesis and Apocalypse (1990) and Dorothee Soelle’s Christ the Representative (1967). I could add: obviously I am not an Atheist Christian.

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