Eco on Secular Credulity

Peter Edman

Novelist and agnostic Umberto Eco has a lovely essay in the London Telegraph a couple weeks ago. In “God isn’t big enough for some people,” he highlights Chesterton’s observation on belief.

It’s worth the time to read through.

Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.

They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms—yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious—to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest. . . .

We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Eco concludes with a comment that the Christian faith is an absurdity (albeit a logical and coherent one). And this is an essentially true statement. It just happens to be a true absurdity. 

A favorite recently discovered quote from an interview with N. T. Wright expresses the paradox nicely:

Look at what Paul actually says when he talks about how people become Christians. Look for instance at 1 Thessalonians where he says quite a lot about [justification] without ever using the word justify or any of its cognates. He talks about the gospel coming to you in the power of the Spirit. You accepted that word not as the word of man but as what it really is, the word of God that is at work in you believers. It’s quite clear what Paul is talking about, that he comes into town announcing that Jesus is Lord, as a royal herald. He is saying that the crucified Jesus is the Lord of the world. And this is not, “Here is a way of salvation. You might like to apply it to yourself.” It’s not, “Here is a new way of being religious and you might enjoy it.” This is really an imperial summons: “On your knees!” Nobody ever went into a Roman town and said, “Caesar is lord and you might like to have this experience of acknowledging him as lord if that suits you.” They said, “Caesar is Lord, get on your knees and we want the tax right now.”

And when that message is announced, some men and women find to their astonishment that they believe it. I say to their astonishment because it’s stupid. Paul says that it’s stupid. He knows it. You can just imagine it. It’s like someone telling a joke in a foreign language and not knowing why people laugh. Paul was going around the Roman world saying that this crucified Jesus is the lord of the world. He must have felt many times this is the craziest thing imaginable yet when I say it, lives are changed, the community emerges, people love each other. That is grace. And it is all of grace.

Gleanings, Faiths and Worldviews, Public Square, Mon 05 Dec 2005