Argumentum ad Misericordiam

"Theodicy in the post-war era is excessively difficult, if not impossible." How many times have we heard this sort of sentiment pronounced, usually with the utmost gravity? And this is the opinion of persons who are friendly toward Christianity, not just that of its enemies. Generally, I think this statement is meant to express that the mass killing of Jews in Europe implies the death of theodicy; certainly the current irreligiosity of the non-Muslim population of Europe is blamed in large part on the experience of the war.

Why is this objection considered valid? It is as if large segments of Christendom decided in the middle of the 20th century that God, after failing to live up to corporate expectations for quite a while, was finally fired-without severance pay. The objection seems to me to be just one more manifestation of what C.S. Lewis described as placing "God in the dock." I also believe that this objection exhibits, in a general way, the argumentum ad misericordiam, also known as the informal fallacy of the "appeal to pity."

No doubt the events of the World Wars were mind-numbing in their demonstration of the human capacity for evil, but traditionally Christianity had told us that this is precisely what we should expect from fallen man. The Enlightenment faulted Christianity for a pessimistic view of human nature, and then its heirs blamed God when humanity turned out to live down to revealed expectations. "Frailty, thy name is Christendom."

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the West felt obligated not only to give God a pink slip, but also to attempt in some way to make reparations to the Jews; the rejection of Christ's atonement meant that sin had to be expiated in some other way. Now, I don't have the slightest inclination to mitigate the horror of what was perpetrated on the Jewish people; however, it seems to me that the general contours of the above-mentioned fallacious argument have, as a result of this desire to assuage collective residual guilt, insinuated themselves into biblical and theological scholarship. Whatever was rightly owed to the Jews after the war, skewing our scholarly perspectives was not part of the reparations package. Residual feelings of guilt, while they might be well-founded, do not serve well as foundational sentiments for biblical or theological studies.

This criticism occurred to me while reading N.T. Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God. Wright, an English Episcopalian, in one passage attacks Bultmann's reading of the New Testament simply because Bultmann concurred with the 19th-century Continental sentiment that the New Testament is not particularly Jewish. Not that I desire to defend Bultmann; I simply object to seeing him attacked on these grounds. Wright goes on to provide an influential account of the New Testament that steeps the primitive Christian church in first-century Judaism, an account which rides in part on the post-war popularity of re-Judaizing the New Testament-which popularity Wright cites favorably.

On the local front here in Brooklyn, Steve Schlissel, a Jewish Christian, has urged an understanding of the Reformed faith that is thoroughly informed by Hebraic and rabbinic theory and praxis. Again, not that I object to Hebraic revisions of the Enlightenment project; I simply object to the persistent emotionalism of Schlissel's appeal. Schlissel rarely states why a particular Jewish practice or perspective is preferable; he presents these proposals as simply preferable because of their Jewishness.

It is this emotionalism, whether in a scholar such as Wright or a popular preacher such as Schlissel, which I object to. The appeal in part resorts to a "the more Jewish it is, the better it is" dynamic. And this dynamic is fueled, at least in part, by the residual guilt of the post-war West. This particular appeal to pity has been effective in the cases of both these men; that does not mitigate the fallaciousness of its structure.