Atheism, Poetry, and the Bible

For atheists, the Old Testament is a collection of ancient myths, and the New Testament an inconsistent and plainly fraudulent record presented as objective history, the work of many lying hands shamelessly proffered by the members of an obscure religious sect in Palestine in the first century of the “Common Era,” as contemporary scholarship calls it.

Atheists’ insistence that all religions—especially Christianity—are merely human inventions is usually explained by their determined and inflexible commitment to scientific materialism, and to their equally rigid historiography.

But why cannot the “historical Jesus” also be the Christ of the four apostolic gospels, which present the evidence for His existence as an historical figure and His life on earth that secular historians have been demanding for two millennia? The wider historical setting for the events recorded in the New Testament is quite recognizably Palestine as it was under the Roman Empire in the reign of Caesar Augustus. Why do secular historians and secularists generally refuse to accept the Gospel accounts as being, in the main, accurate?

One reason they give is that the brief histories attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John do not agree with one another in every detail. Which is only what one would expect in the circumstances and which testifies, if anything, to their honesty, unselfconsciousness, and authenticity. Another reason given is evidence that each Gospel may have been the work of several authors, something that (if true) does nothing to disprove their veracity and sincerity.

A more significant reason has to do with their recounting miraculous deeds and occurrences, which the third President of the United States famously subtracted from the Jefferson Bible. Of course, believers may argue plausibly that the universe itself is miraculous and its creation an actual miracle, as many leading astrophysicists have suggested in recent decades, one of them going so far as to say that the closest thing to the astronomer’s Big Bang is the account given in Genesis. One would expect, indeed, that for men of science, the creation of Something-out-of-Nothing is the most miraculous thing one can imagine. Life is another miracle whose ultimate origins science cannot satisfactorily name, but the Bible can—and it does.

An often-heard claim by atheists and other people who reject Biblical truth is that the authors of New Testament wrote with the express purpose of fulfilling the prophecies of the Old Testament, inventing new materials as they went along while taking care to create references to the old ones by inserting echoes of them into their texts. The continuities between Old and New, such people concede, are real enough, but they insist they are faked in order to establish a credible and convincing narrative line from the Creation to the Ascension. It is a claim that has been proven false innumerable times in the past 2000 years. It is also one that ought to be laid to rest by Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth in two volumes (among other writings), which demonstrates that the feat is humanly impossible: the correlations and references between the Old and New Testaments are so numerous, so often minute, so various, and so frequently veiled as to place such an effort beyond the competency of the human mind to accomplish.

Still, it takes a careful, critical, and receptive reading of the text to perceive and appreciate how perfectly and exquisitely the Bible hangs together across all its books and the four Gospels. Atheists however, including the so-called New Atheists of recent decades and all previous ones from whom we have heard on the subject, have been notably lacking in literary sensibility and a critical faculty. Or, if they did possess these things, they failed to exercise their gifts on Sacred Scripture and hence to appreciate the superhuman artistry, complexity, and integrity of a massive literary work directly inspired by the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

Their lack of anything approaching a critical bent, however, is not their principal handicap in confronting and understanding the supreme work of literature in history. That is their total inability to read and understand the thing called “poetry.” If atheists and their skeptical brethren could (or would) bring to their reading of the Bible the intellectual seriousness, attention, rigor, and above all humility that conscientious literary critics (and some college professors) apply to their reading of the monuments of world literature—the epics, the dramas, the double-decker novels—they might be able to form a true impression of the literally Divine Work they dismiss as nothing more than the most elaborate hoax ever perpetrated on the human race.

The fact is that unbelievers, including those who do not wish to believe, read (if they read them at all) the 73 books of the Bible as if it were a vast, assertive, and tendentious catechism, the burden of which is “This is what I believe—and what you too must believe, down to last dotted ‘i’ and crossed ‘t,’ on pain of eternal Hell-fire.” Needless to say, that is not how anyone should approach the Good Book, whether on the first reading of it, or the hundredth.

“Take it and read….” But read it as the inspired work of the supreme Poet and Dramatist, in the same way (to begin with, at least) that one reads the plays of Shakespeare. To be appreciated at first for its poetic and literary merits, the beauty of its language, its high drama, and its characters who are instantly recognizable and humanly convincing figures, as true to life as their motives and their actions. The fact that poetry has dwindled almost to the vanishing point over the last century as the audience for it has shrunk to a tiny audience of academics and fellow poets (also mostly academics) has made popular poetic appreciation and comprehension a thing of the past, in parallel with the ability to read and understand literature, imaginative and otherwise, as anything more than a political statement and as social or socio-political propaganda.

A sophisticated reader, by contrast, and one who is open moreover to the possibility that the Bible is what it purports to be, should have no trouble perceiving the transcendent truth behind the people and the events recorded in the Gospels, in particular those leading up to the Passion. Christ’s fate is humanly, as well as supernaturally, inevitable from the beginning of His public ministry down to the Crucifixion; it is the way of the world, always has been, and always will be for people who assume the role that He took upon Himself for three years. So are the actions of those who doubt Him and of His persecutors. The Gospels, indeed, amount to one lengthy and overwhelming “shock of recognition,” that of the reality of the human race and the world. With a little help from the Holy Spirit, Faith should follow the literate, sincere, and unprejudiced reader of the Bible as surely as the day follows the night.

T.S. Eliot, with notable egocentricity, once remarked that people should be prepared to devote to understanding and appreciating a poem by him the time and rigorous attention that a barrister spends on preparing a brief. While the meaning of the Bible is humanly inexhaustible, one need not devote to grasping it the degree of technical attention that Eliot claimed for his poetry, the Lord having revealed to His little ones the same message He revealed to the learned and powerful.

That He did so is itself a minor miracle. Who, after all—what human agency—could have made up the Christian religion out of his own head, as G.K. Chesterton asked? The answer is, “No one;” nor could anyone, man or woman including the saints of either sex, have imagined in advance the truths to be discovered there.

Catholic World Report