Bible or Babel? David Elliot Originally published in Issue IV of Vulgata,  January, 2002. The image is by Nicholas Cadorette, and can be found here.

Just picture it: Jesus all disheveled, sun-burnt, and gaunt from forty days of fasting in the demon-haunted Judean desert.  The sun beats murderously upon His brow, and His only companions; the scorpions, vipers, and tarantulas, scuttle about feverishly, with not a soul to be seen for endless miles.  Or is there?  Scripture says that Satan came to tempt Jesus as He fasted in the wilderness, posing to Him an unholy trinity of questions aimed at corrupting His will.  Futilely so, for He from whose fingertips planets are born and at whose glance Heaven and Earth flee away cannot be purchased with earthly tinsel.  The devil himself is spoken of as appearing in the guise of a serpent, and so we tend to picture him as a rather livid garden-variety snake.  Perhaps your imagination is beefy enough to envision him as a big red-eyed cobra, but that is usually as far as we get.  If we look to the original Hebrew text, though, we see that the word translated "serpent", Nahash, also stands for a dragon (Isaiah 27:1) or a sea-monster (Job 26:13), so the horror Jesus faced was truly the stuff of nightmares.  Therefore the question must be raised: “Why did he go through with all of that?”

Surely we pampered worldlings could not have endured his desert fast for forty minutes let alone forty days.  If the heat by day, the chill by night, the venomous creepers and the long starvation didn't put us to flight, no doubt the presence of Satan breathing beside us in the darkness would have!  But Christ does not balk.  He stands His ground and when the Devil (ever aping the philanthropist) tells Him to satisfy His hunger by turning stones into bread, Christ rebukes him, saying:  "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" (Mt 4:4).  Now the word of God is Sacred Scripture, which elsewhere is described as being "God-breathed" (2 Tim 3:16).  True, the term "Word of God" refers primarily to the eternal Person of Christ Himself (see John's prologue), but secondarily it speaks of Divine Revelation, especially as it exists in Scripture.  This saying of Christ implies that the Word of God is to our souls what bread is to our bodies: food, nourishment, and life.  But the essential point is that Jesus would rather have died of starvation than dispense with the word of God.  He endured the blistering heat and infernal advances out of fidelity to the Word and set a precedent of zeal for Sacred Scripture compared to which our biblical illiteracy of today falls abysmally short.

The fact that the more candid media darlings have already labeled society "post-biblical" brings this home to us only too well.  Western civilization was built upon the rock of the Bible, and now as that foundation is removed, it too is foundering.  A recent statistic spoke to the effect that Baywatch now reaches more people world-wide than the Bible.  Surely the angels are weeping.  We have become more interested in titillation than in salvation, in the babble of Babel than in God's love-letter to the world.  And Catholics, too, have this "ink" on their hands.  Far from being a happy refuge from the maelstrom of ignorance, the sight of the yawning faces of parishioners during Scripture readings at Mass is difficult to square with the Spartan features of Christ living off the word of God in the desert.  So where have we gone wrong?  Perhaps more pointedly: have we gone wrong at all?  The Christian says yes, the secularist no, so who’s in the right on this one?  Since it is a point of contention whether we should lament or applaud the decline of the Biblical world view, we must first look at whether the loss of Biblicism in society has left us richer or poorer.

Atheistic modernism would contend that by ridding ourselves of the Biblical world view, we have finally got things right.  Parroting Freud, Nietzche, Darwin, and Marx, atheists point to our post-Biblicism as a sign of humanity come of age.  They see the Bible as a paper dinosaur that has outlived its welcome, as the physiognomy of a barbarism happily shed.  "R.I.P.!" they cry lustily as dust blankets our once well-thumbed Bibles and a rabid this-worldliness spreads its wings over the globe.  "The Bible is all just a myth" they say, even if one "breathed through silver".  The well-known banning sprees of the Bible in schools and in the media are received with unutterable throbs of delight.  "The moral straitjacket has finally been shed" they grin, "and now we can … we can …" what?  What can we do?  Where do we go from here?  This is the question that atheists have failed to answer.

Peter Kreeft, in his Three Philosophies of Life, stated the problem succinctly:  "Ancient ethics always dealt with three questions.  Modern (i.e. atheistic) ethics deals with only one, or at the most, two.  The three questions are like the three things a fleet of ships is told by its sailing orders (the analogy is from C.S. Lewis).  First, the ships must know how to avoid bumping into each other.  This is social ethics, and modern as well as ancient ethicists deal with it.  Second, they must know how to stay shipshape and avoid sinking.  This is individual ethics, virtues and vices, character-building, and we hear very little about this from our modern ethical philosophies.  Third, and most important of all, they must know why the fleet is at sea in the first place … I think I know why modern philosophers dare not raise this greatest of questions: because they have no answer to it."  True to form, if we take the atheistic philosophers at their word, we see that individual ethics and the question of why we are here end up unabashedly fudged.  Instead of addressing the hearts deepest longings, their philosophies are characterized by the inescapable experience of apparent meaninglessness and cosmic angst.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a book called No Exit which spoke of the inescapability of a close-circuited misery we are fated to bear without reprieve all our life.  He concluding by saying: "I have now answered every question a philosopher can ask but one: why I do not take my own life."  Albert Camus commented poignantly on the ashen life man is doomed to lead without God, stating that future historians would be able to sum up modern (that is, post-biblical) man in a single sentence: "He fornicated and read the newspapers".  He further commented that man was doomed to be a stranger in this world since he had no permanent relation to anyone, either to God or to neighbour. Friedrich Nietzche, the most vigorous of the atheistic thinkers, demonized Christianity as "slave morality, the herd mentality" and saw it as an anemic, effeminate perversion of the yea-saying affirmation of life and power to which man is destined.  Love of God and neighbour were replaced with "A will to war, a will to power, a will to overpower" and he touted raw, dynamic, virile passion as the creative and aesthetic key to gripping life by the jugular so as to taste of its blood.  Nietzche lived his philosophy to a "t", and died (perhaps by suicide -- we don't know for sure) an insane and tortured "proof" of his own philosophy's unlivability.  To posterity he has left the proclamation that God is dead, that there is no real right or wrong, and that truth is only a fiction.  But can we believe then that this is true?  It's like listening to the Cretan who said "All Cretans are liars".  His very words contradict himself.  It was probably this kind of wallow in doublethink that drew from G.K. Chesterton the wry comment: "Modern thought is so called in order to distinguish it from thought."

Nietzche, Sartre, Camus, and their ilk tried to shout Heaven down with their war-cry of "God is dead", but they ended in ruin and despair.  They hungered and thirsted for the exhilarating experience of life in its fullness, but they forgot the true saying of St. Irenaeus:  "Man fully alive is the glory of God … and the life of man is the vision of God" (emphasis mine).  Our civilization (a word that will presently become a euphemism) is dying because it has no reason for living.  It is like the fleet of ships that doesn't know why it has set out to sea.  Our ships are leaky, their sails have become tattered, and now the sailors are jumping overboard.  When life is full of meaning and purposeful, the situation is quite the reverse: we can then endure all kinds of pain and suffering (witness the old Christian martyrs in the Roman Coliseum).  But when we reach the point where, like Sartre, we can't even answer the question "Why don't I take my own life?" even a cold seems to make life too burdensome to bear.

The Jewish psychologist Victor Frankl is a powerful witness to the truth of this.  He endured the macabre horrors of Auschwitz as well as a Russian labour camp, and said that the only way one could survive such a nightmare was by seeing a deeper meaning in it and by clinging to hope in God.  Thus he said that older men could survive by holding to hope while young men in their prime expired through giving up.  In the end he concluded that "A man can survive any how as long as he has a why".  Having given up God and dispensed with the Biblical world-view, modern man has lost his why, his reason for being.  According to Frankl, then, the true bane of contentment is a loss of the meaning and hope vouchsafed to us by a life rooted in God. This is why man without God becomes a wispy, ghost-like, and insubstantial parody of the moral miracle we were created to be: saints.  We become dark angels beating our wings impotently in the void, and all the artful vituperations of a Nietzche and a Sartre amount to little more than a lot of noise attempting to conceal the fact.

Yet the question still remains: “Why have the atheists rejected the Bible?”  I think there are two primary reasons for this.  The first has to do with the kind of festering, unsmiling, volcanic pride we see in a Nietzche who resented the idea of being the inferior of anything or anyone – God included.  Such a man resents Christianity precisely because he cannot master it, cannot dominate it.  He cannot of course do this because whereas knowledge of any other thing makes man the master of the thing he knows, knowledge of God makes man the servant of the One Who knows him.  This is the fact that really stank in the nostrils of Nietzche and caused him to shake his fist in the face of the Almighty.  Such a one becomes like the boy in Aesop’s Fables who tried to reach across the fence to steal the farmer’s grapes.  Famishment gleams in his eye as he reaches for them, but failing to grasp the ripe sprig he becomes red-eyed and shouts to his friends “They must be sour grapes”.  A man with an insatiable little idol burning in his heart would rather paint the whole world black than bow before his Maker, and in the end this just becomes an elaborate defense against the experience of joy.

The second breed of atheist is a completely different kettle of fish.  This is by far the larger of the two groups, and indeed, the more honest.  Its position is summed up by Aldous Huxley who admired Christ and the Bible, but refused to accept either: “We resisted Christianity and we rejected it” he said, “because we wanted our sexual freedom”.  There’s the rub.  If you take the Biblical teaching that the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit, it follows that you cannot worship the golden calf of eroticism on its altar.  Huxley is right: the decision of most people to reject Christianity is one arrived at in the loins, not the brains.  Nothing seems to put the fear of Hell into people like the word “chastity” these days, since it refers to continence and sexual rectitude.  This is not to say that Christianity is a front for Victorian prudishness (in fact, St. Thomas Aquinas called the inability to enjoy God-given pleasure a vice), just that sex is to be confined to its proper sphere of marriage.  For a description of the moral vacuum and existential emptiness that are left in the wake of divorce from God, rejection of a real right and wrong and the abandonment to pleasure, we need look no further than the pen of Shakespeare, who wrote:

“… right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar justice resides)
Should lose their names, and so should justice too
Then everything includes itself in power
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up himself.”

Over and against the emptiness of the atheistic world view the powerful message of the Bible still calls us home like a light-tower.  Rustling through all the leaves of Scripture is the rumour of a “beauty ever-ancient ever-new” that brings healing in its wings.  Though the symbol of atheism has become a question mark, Christianity is still speaking with an exclamation point.  If any feel dubious that a return to a robust Biblicism would merely be a hankering for the past, consider the words of G.K. Chesterton: “Turning back the clock is the sensible and progressive thing to do when it starts keeping the wrong time.”  And this is what we look for in Scripture, the truth that is timely because timeless, the message of salvation through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Vatican II taught that the Bible is the “source of the interior life and of apostolic fruitfulness”, which means that devout meditation upon Sacred Scripture is absolutely essential to the Christian life.  For those of us unfamiliar with it, a good Catholic Bible Study is just what Providence ordered.  The section on Scripture in the Catechism of the Catholic Church is also a must.  It illustrates how august and inspired the Church’s understanding of Scripture over two thousand years has been.  A balanced approach is always needed, and this is just what we have.  The bark of St. Peter has always skillfully navigated between the Scylla of liberalism and the Charybdis of fundamentalism.  The Church has always pointed us to Scripture to find solid answers to the fundamental questions of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny – questions which atheism blushes to face.  More than this, we find there not just words but the Word, not just abstractions but a Person - the “shade of His hand outstretched caressingly”.  This is the book that inspired civilizations in the past and can still breathe the breath of life back into ours.  We would do well to listen to the voice of the angel who led St. Augustine to conversion of heart by crying out “Tolle lege!  Tolle lege!” “Take up and read!  Take up and read!”