Can there be justice without God? Many of the developments in the modern state since the American and French revolutions have answered this in the affirmative. The Enlightenment and its legacy have tried to create a “secular” society in which natural law and reason guide both individual rights and the purposes and functions of the state. The results have been mixed.
But can there be God without justice? Can a world in which disease, ignorance, brutality, and all the causes and effects of war and oppression, really affirm a belief system that posits a supreme being who creates, sustains and then redeems humanity and the universe? In the wake of Hitler, the death camps, Stalin and Hiroshima and of a post-war world in which many millions more have been humiliated, starved or slaughtered, this remains the basic existential question of our time. How can a just, merciful and peaceful God cause or even allow these atrocities? Is it not more reasonable to assume that such a god is a mere projection of our primitive dreams and fears and to finally acknowledge that God is dead or has never existed?
On the other hand, to talk positively about the spirit, much less God, is to talk about the working of peace in the world, to attempt to intuit and then envision a universe that tends toward justice, harmony and unity, creativity and understanding. In the great God Debate of the past decade, peace, justice and the existence of God therefore remain inseparable for believer, agnostic and nonbeliever.
It is no coincidence that God’s most vociferous recent critics — Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett — take as central to their intellectual and moral condemnations religion’s social and political impact on the world: its historical role in actively preventing or passively delaying the creation of peace and justice. For the God Debate is not about academic definitions or the ego satisfactions to be gained from outwitting and out-arguing one’s opponents but about our vision of the world as it exists, and as we imagine its perfection.
Like most debates in which the stakes are high and the players highly skilled, rapid-fire discourse tends to remix reasoned argument with deep-seated passion. Almost all of what Dawkins and Hitchens say about religion’s role in the injustices and outrages of the contemporary world and its historical roots are true; all their passion for stripping off organized religion’s delusional masks correct.
But much of what they say about the role of spirit and imagination, of vision and aspiration in creating a more peaceful and just world has been amateurish, under-researched and unthinking. This is why Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate comes at such an important time and is such a valuable book.
Eagleton himself is a well known and accomplished literary critic who here extends his formidable abilities of deconstruction — and his Marxist sensibility — to both the basic texts of the Judeo-Christian tradition and to some of the current intellectual scene’s most prominent critics of that tradition.
With brevity, skill and good humor Eagleton asks some uncomfortable questions designed not to put down his opponents but to cast doubt on their and our own complacent certitudes. What does it mean when comfortable men of power — at the very center of influence — mock the beliefs and spiritual aspirations of the disenfranchised and the powerless whose very oppression and marginalization feeds the fundamentalisms of Christianity and Islam? On the other hand, what can such faith possibly mean if it is devoid of good works, that is, if the basic tenets of our religious systems are not keyed to the implementation of peace and justice in this world? Are not such “faiths” nothing but a set of fundamentalist propositions that look forward to and abet the apocalyptic resolution of the very existential problems that they confront?
For Eagleton, whether the Marxist or the Christian, such good works are at the very core of the Judeo-Christian, indeed of the Muslim, call for love in the world, a virtue, he notes, that seems sorely lacking in the arrogance of the “Ditchkins’” attacks upon the religious faith of their ignorant inferiors. Ultimately Eagleton as literary critic, political activist and spiritual man rejects postmodernism’s skepticism toward conviction and calls for a renewed faith based not on fundamentalist certitudes but on an openness to grace, imagination and art: the alternative space to both ideology and postmodern skepticism, a space where the roots of peace and justice forever take hold.
