There’s something about Christopher Hitchens that makes him a less grating personality than some of the other celebrity atheists of the moment.
Nevertheless, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern: When discussing his many debates with believers during his book tour for God is Not Great, Hitchens depicts himself as delivering the irrefutable argument or teasing out some breathtaking concession from his debate opponent or having to endure some lesser mind.
The reality is usually more complicated than that.
This pattern became especially clear in an interview Hitchens granted to Jennie Rothenberg Gritz of The Atlantic’s website.
Consider how Hitchens describes a three-hour debate with Presbyterian minister Mark Roberts, which took place on The Hugh Hewitt Show:
I debated a guy named Mark Roberts, Hugh Hewitt’s choice of pastor. Hewitt is a major Christian broadcaster and he said, “I’m going to put up a champion against you.” I said, “Bring it on!” So I asked this guy, Roberts, “Do you believe St. Matthew when he describes the crucifixion and says all of the graves of Jerusalem opened and all the corpses walked around greeting their old friends?”
And he answered too quickly. He said, “Yes, I do, of course I do. I’m a Christian — I have to believe it.” But he added, “As a historian, I’m not absolutely sure.” I said, “Thanks for that. I must say, it’s the most incredible answer I ever heard.”
The guy spent half the time saying that a great deal of what I wrote in the book is right. Several of them have done that. Which is enjoyable.
Looking at the transcript of that debate, Roberts is not as flummoxed or defeated as Hitchens implies:
CH: Well, I mean, you force me to press you. I mean, do you think that at the time of the Crucifixion, the graves in the greater Jerusalem area opened, and many of the dead came out and walked the streets? That’s one account.
MR: Yes.
CH: It’s not sustained, but you do think that happened?
MR: It’s in Matthew’s Gospel.
CH: Yes.
MR: As a believer, I think it happens. If I put on my historian hat, I say this is one Gospel, one witness to this. This makes it again, now speaking as a historian, historically unlikely. As a believer, I believe it. What I’m talking about is …
CH: I find it absolutely flabbergasting, because among other things, that surely degrades the idea of resurrection by making it commonplace.
MR: It degrades the idea of resurrection …
CH: If it can happen to … if just the graves had opened and anyone can get up and walk around, what’s so special about the proposed resurrection of the Nazarene?
MR: Well, you know, it’s even worse than that, because Christian theology holds that every person will be resurrected, so we’ve thoroughly degraded it.
(In his interview with The Atlantic, Hitchens takes pride in having to explain to a Catholic talk-show host the difference between Mary’s immaculate conception and Jesus’ virgin birth. In the debate on Hewitt’s program, Roberts had to explain to Hitchens that New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman has not considered himself a Christian for a few decades.)
Similarly, Douglas Wilson is reduced to a “weird guy” who speaks mostly of soda-pop bottles when debating whether people must believe in God to live moral lives. (Their six-part debate begins here.)
Perhaps most astonishingly, Hitchens seems to believe that most people now agree with his argument that Mother Teresa was a fraud who should burn in Hell:
When Mother Teresa said abortion and contraception were equivalent to murder and were the greatest threat to world peace — nobody could have said anything with such wicked consequences! She tried to demolish the only cure for poverty that we know for sure exists, which is the empowerment of women. I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise. And if you throw a handful of seeds and some credit to these ladies, the village will be transformed in a couple of years.
Mother Teresa spent her entire life trying to make that impossible. I would say that millions of people are much worse off for her efforts. On an Irish radio show on a recent Sunday morning, I said, “I wish there was a hell for the bitch to go to.” You couldn’t have said that a few years ago. You would have gotten a terrible pasting for it. But now, everybody knows it’s true. They see through this stuff.
The interview provides a good glimpse into Hitchens’ personality, including his contrarian resistance to some atheists’ preferred designation of Brights:
Now a disagreement I’ve had with Dawkins — whose work is incredibly important to us all — and with Daniel Dennett, too, is about whether atheists should rename themselves as “brights.” I disagree with this completely because it exactly materializes what believers think of us, that we’re some sort of snobbish elite. And it has the further implication that you have to be smart to see through religion. I know for certain that that’s not true. Many, many people are made — as I am — unable to believe. They just can’t bring themselves to do it.
I think people are naturally revolted by obscurantism and obfuscation. For whatever reasons, at any rate, there have been many times in history where mass movements of people have burned the churches down. People who were quite unlettered would think, “All of this is quite untrue.”
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July 19, 2007, at 5:18 pm
[…] Christopher Hitchens’ infallible insults There’s something about Christopher Hitchens that makes him a less grating personality than some of the other celebrity atheists of the moment. […]
July 19, 2007, at 5:34 pm
The insults are there if you are as dogmatic as CH. However, when a believer says I know such and such is true but has to say trust me as to the proof and expect CH to believe him, CH is also being insulted. We all accept something relative to the beginning of life and/or life after death on FAITH. But it does seems that we differ in how much we can accept on FAITH. Life on Earth would be a lot more pleasant for all if humanity could accept and live with that difference. It seems to me that religious journalism is a very sensitive occupation as you never know when you are going to hit someone’s hot button and trigger actions that may hurt other people severely.
July 19, 2007, at 8:00 pm
Less grating after what he said about Mother Teresa? Give me a break!
July 19, 2007, at 10:37 pm
When recounting a story, one tends to put a bit of a shine on it to make it seem as if the other guy was all wrong, and you were all right. And, incidentally, that you won the debate. Same here.
But I must say that what the pastor said in the interview transcript and what CH remembered later about it are not far apart in intent, though CH’s memory is a bit off as to exact wording.
Clearly, the pastor said that as a Christian believer, he believed in those resurrections, but as a *historian,* not so much. Which is a statement not out of line with what a liberal TEC or Methodist or mainline PCUSA Christian might say - i.e. that it was, I suppose, metaphorical. (Question: is this Pastor Roberts a PCUSA Pastor?)
As for the assertion that CH’s views on Mother Theresa have achieved great acceptance to the point that when he espouses them, they are no longer even controversial or merit much comment - let alone outcry - I need to see polling data on that one.
Also adding to the belief that he is simply debating liberal Christians is this from the Atlantic article:
If no one is saying this, then these are hollow debates indeed. But then again, maybe his memory is playing trick on him again.
July 19, 2007, at 11:40 pm
There are rather more instances of mass movements killing all the local Jews. People who were quite unlettered would think “All of them are quite evil.”
So I suppose this would demonstrate the natural iniquity of the Jews?
July 20, 2007, at 12:21 am
Gosh. The Presbyterian minister’s response is just pathetic.
July 20, 2007, at 2:46 am
I’ll give CH this, he has an incredible wit -and perhaps a bit of insight. Occasionally, as in this…
And this funny bit.
He does admit he was “quite rude” in his comments about Falwell.
I find it interesting that the reporter got so much out of him in the Atlantic article. CH actually believes in Religious Education for his children, but not just using any Bible, he believes in using the KJV. Only. Because it reflects the language of Shakespeare and others. Maybe some cultural Leftists need to listen to his reasoning, because they go ballistic at the mere mention of such a thing.
July 20, 2007, at 5:56 am
At least he let his guard down in the last quote, when he apparently applauds pogroms.
But then again, he also thinks that the only working cure against poverty is killing the poor … or rather convice the poor to kill their own.
I think CH’s views on Mother Theresa are in the main simply ignored, and if he brings them up, either applauded by the Hitchenites and written off as the personal craze of an otherwise sane man (not that I endorse the latter classification).
July 20, 2007, at 11:09 am
Hitchens’ question to the pastor about the “resurrection” of the saints in Jerusalem is precisely the kind of question and answer that takes more time to unpack than in a sound-bite setting. It may surprise some of you that a respected evangelical NT scholar has argued that Matthew is not rendering a “literal” historical event but is, with narrative art, bringing out the theological significance of the event of Christ’s death. The argument is considerably nuanced and calls for a historically and literarily informed judgment. It would take too many words and too much time to unpack this here, but it’s another example of the limitations of public debate, not to speak of journalistic renderings of such matters.
July 20, 2007, at 11:31 am
I don’t see in the pastor’s comment what people are reading into it. I think what he’s saying is that he believed it actually happened but he’s not about to cough up enough historical evidence for it to make it as accepted a fact as Caesar conquering Gaul or something. Which is true enough. While some scholars such have N.T. Wright have claimed that Jesus’ resurrection is historically provable, I don’t think anyone’s made that claim about this particular passage.
July 20, 2007, at 12:12 pm
The bizarre thing (well, one bizarre thing among many!)about Hitchens is the way he seems to invoke the God he doesn’t believe in!
It may be arrogant for a Christian to say “God is on my side.” But to say, as Hitchens often does, “I wish there WAS a Hell for (Jerry Falwell/Mother Theresa/Whoever He’s Mad At This Week) to go to is to say “God doesn’t exist, but if He did, He’d be on MY side.” That’s more than arrogant, it’s preposterous!
July 20, 2007, at 12:21 pm
CH is a talented writer, and he has made no secret of his disdain for theism long before his book was published. I found Mark Roberts’ comments to be pathetic, and I hope to God that he isn’t Christianity’s “champion”. I was left wondering if Roberts believed in the deity of Christ or understood the Incarnation. I certainly couldn’t prove he did from his answers. One of the most scathing criticisms of Hitchens’ book that I’ve read to date was by an atheist, Alonzo Fyfe.
July 20, 2007, at 3:53 pm
On the contrary, I think Roberts exercised a great amount of self-control by not responding to Hitchens’ provocations in kind, i.e. “Why Christopher, what a stupid, immoral belief. (pause) Of course, I’m not implying that you’re stupid and immoral.”
The problem with Roberts’ response regarding the historicity of the account in Matthew is that Roberts doesn’t expressly state an assumption underlying his argument: that “history” and actual, temporal events are not the same thing. Something is “history” when it meets certain criteria of objective evidence set by historians; if the criteria are met then the historians call it “history” (this would be true even if the evidence itself was fraudulent, but there was no objective evidence to prove that it was so). If the criteria are not met, then the event isn’t “historical”, even if it actually occurred.
It’s safe to say that in 200 years or so, my existence won’t be an accepted part of history, because, unless things change drastically, I’m not going to leave much of a trail of evidence— undoubtedly it will be significantly less than that left by Jesus. That doesn’t make my existence any less real.
Of course, historians won’t be much interested in the question of my existence, so they’re not going to choose criteria that will address that question. At least to my non-historian experience, historians are much more concerned with issues of political legitimacy, so they choose their criteria accordingly. The problem is whether those criteria are appropriate when they are applied to a person like Jesus, or to religious claims in general.
Which brings us back to the original point of Douglas’ post. Given Hitchens’ rather skewed recitation of his own experience versus that which can be established by outside evidence, do we want to take his offended sense of historical propriety seriously? I say not. In Hitchens’ own words:
July 20, 2007, at 5:07 pm
Not to get too far from the story, but re:Dale’s comments, if hundreds of corpses rose from the dead in Jerusalem, it either happened (i.e. it’s historical) or it did not, and it’s metaphorical and theological.
Many conservative pastors would vigorously argue that if it’s in the Bible, it indeed literally happened. A liberal pastor would equivocate and evade the question, as Rev. Roberts did, and lean towards the more liberal, less literal interpretation.
Which still makes a fine interview, of course. But a match-up of an athiest who denies the supernatural with a minister who denies the supernatural kind of takes the wind out of the debate of … well, the existence of the supernatural, doesn’t it? In other words, I question the selection of pastors for this challenge.
I read the Douglas Wilson/Chris Hitchens debate last night and found it to be a bit more in-depth than the way Douglas LeBlanc portrays Wilson as being “reduced to a ‘weird guy’ who speaks mostly of soda-pop bottles when debating whether people must believe in God…” Although Hitchen’s comment that the points Wilson make could be used as a defense for almost ANY theistic Faith was a valid one, at least until about the fourth part of the 6-part debate, when Wilson clearly gains a second wind and becomes far more didactic in soteriology, and kind of backs CH into a corner regarding WHAT authority he uses to obtain his version of right and wrong.
July 20, 2007, at 5:53 pm
It seems to me that this is the best interpretation. I don’t think it’s that hard to unpack—you just have to start challenging Hitchens’ criteria of truth. Christians believe this really happened, but how? I think it was a wonderful opportunity to challenge the positivism of the age.
July 20, 2007, at 7:22 pm
“I read Douglas Wilson/Chris Hitchens debate last night and found it to be a bit more in-depth than the way Douglas LeBlanc portrays”
Agreed, Stephen A. - read it, loved it. Wilson refused to let Hitchens off the hook for using words like “right/wrong” and “good/evil” and thereby claiming a basis for any morality operating from merely an (ever-changing) evolutionary foundation instead of a (fixed) theistic one.
Also liked Wilson’s calling out Hitchens for using explanations for the universe’s existence from within the universe itself. Wilson: “If one were to spill milk accidentally on the kitchen floor, and someone else came in and wanted to know what had happened, the one thing we can be sure of is that such an inquiring mind wouldn’t ask the milk. The milk wouldn’t know. It’s the accident.” Brilliant.
July 20, 2007, at 8:12 pm
Stephen:
I think you’re seeing a conflict where there isn’t necessarily one. Roberts says he believes that the event occurred because the Bible says so. He finds Matthew’s account in the gospel reliable on its own terms, not upon the judgment of professional historians.
A separate question is: can he prove to a panel of historians that it happened? That depends on what the panel of historians use for criteria to determine what events are and are not “historical”. No matter what criteria the historians choose, some events they describe as “historical” will have never happened (the inevitably faulty criteria have permitted non-events to be classified as “historical”) and some events they describe as “not historical” will have actually happened (the inevitably faulty criteria have denied an actual occurrence in time and space).
So instead of “historical or not historical”, we have the options of: (a) an historical event (an event that occurred and that historians accept as history); (b) an historical non-event (an event that never occurred and historians nevertheless accept as history); (c) a non-historical event (an actual event that historians reject as history) and (d) a non-historical non-event (an event that never occurred and that historians reject as history).
Hitchens would say that Matthew’s account of the crucifixion is (d) a non-historical non-event, and that we know it didn’t happen because the historians have applied their criteria and determined it didn’t happen. At worst, Roberts is saying the account is (c), a non-historical event, that we know that it happened from the testimony of scripture and the church, but the historians have applied faulty criteria and reached the wrong conclusion.
Roberts isn’t attacking the veracity of scripture; he’s attacking the veracity of “history”. If Hitchens is as intelligent as he makes out to be, he’s got to understand that, but Roberts’ point doesn’t make easy fodder for a polemicist (read: cheap shot artist) like Hitchens.
July 20, 2007, at 11:26 pm
DANR:
I agree—Hitchens got dealt with in that debate, no doubt about it. I can’t believe he had the gall to mock Wilson after that! I hope someday that my feeble attempts at apologetics will have some of the clarity that was on display in that debate.
July 21, 2007, at 6:04 pm
I saw Hitchens on ‘Meet the Press’ with Tim Russert. He strikes me as a person who has attended private(probably Catholic)school all his life; Like many Catholics and some Christians, his backlash against Christianity seems to be as a result of some kind of bad experience with religion. Unfortunately, as little as I know about him, he seems ignorant of Confessional Christianity.
July 24, 2007, at 1:32 pm
Dale, the bottom line is: Did a group of corpses get up out of their graves and walk around, or did they not?
I think you’re deconstructing the idea of history a bit too much here, and in kind of an obscure way, in a vain effort to serve literalism.
You’re making far too much out of the criteria a panel of historians holds as “truth.” In fact, the major criterion for historical truth is verifiability. Is there any other account of this mass corpse-raising event in Jewish historical records? That would be one critera ALL historians would require, and I can’t imagine this going unnoticed or unrecorded by others.
In fact, even the pastor debating Hitchens said that only one Gospel’s account wasnt enough for verifiability as this being a historical fact:
If you had a panel of fundamentalist historians, however, whose “criteria” is that every word about this event is literally, historicaly true, then yeah, they would accept the walking corpse account as “historical.” For me, it does no harm at all to see this as a metaphorical promise (or even a parable) that all will be resurrected and judged.
Where you lose people like Hitchens - and even Theists like me - is when you tie yourself up in knots trying to make what is a perfectly acceptable allegory into a ludicrous historical necessity.
I’m not sure what the effect would be if hundreds (thousands?) of corpses had risen from their graves and wandered the streets of Jersusalem. How terrifying! And how utterly unnecessary for a Christian’s faith to believe this accually, literaly occurred as a historical fact.
Jesus raising Lazurus from the dead is a miracle of Faith and at least has context. Thousands of zombies rising from graves is a horror movie, because its inexplicable as a “miracle” to send zombies to haunt their old friends for no stated theological or religious purpose.
July 24, 2007, at 2:33 pm
Stephen,
As you know, the Gospels are not some sort of Jesus diary, nor do they attempt to be some ‘objective’ account of ‘what really happened.’ Nevertheless, I don’t think the evangelist is giving us an allegory or metaphor—rather, I think he is interpreting Christ’s saving work. Did anyone see this happen with his own eyes? No, but through revelation, and _realization_, of who Christ was, and what He came to do, the evangelist _knows_ (in the strongest sense of the word) that this happened. Calling it a metaphor or allegory is akin to saying the same about the Trinity (and this is coming from someone who holds a high opinion of metaphor and allegory).
July 24, 2007, at 5:02 pm
Well, my point was that the passage represents a theological truth to Christians rather than a mere historical record. You’re right, no one saw this. It was purely theological and an allegory to a future resurrection. Allegories do not require witnesses, nor do parables. They’re stories illustrating a truth.
Theological truths don’t need the same kind of concrete physical evidence that historical truths require, and perhaps that’s where Dale was going with his comments. But a “Jesus diary” was exactly what Dale seemed to be implying the passage represent, and that requires somersaults and language games to make it “fit” the definition of what we all believe to be History.
I’ve never heard the Trinity called an allegory or metaphor, so I don’t think that would be a good analogy to what I was attempting. Though it is theological, and does illustrate a Truth, like the empty graves in Jerusalem did in Matthew.
The Trinity belief transcends history, while this passage supposedly occurred completlely WITHIN history, and that’s where the discussion has to take place, if it’s alleged the walking dead event was historical. The answer is to take it out of history, and deal with it on its own, theological terms.
The danger of debating theology in the media (and with atheists, of all people) is that it’s very easy to make statements that can later be taken out of context by the reporter or by the “opponent,” as the pastor found out.
August 7, 2007, at 6:22 am
It wasn’t LeBlanc who was portraying Wilson that way, he’s claiming that Hitchens portrayed him that way in the Atlantic article. I read the exchange between Wilson and Hitchens a few weeks ago, and Hitchens totally loses the debate (but doesn’t seem to realise it). Also, as far as I remember, Wilson does provide Hitchens with the direct answer he claims he never receives in these debates. Wilson is very clear about the strong (and exclusive) truth claims of Christianity.
I highly recommend that you all go and read the debate.
Tg
August 8, 2007, at 12:21 am
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