Dawkins and the King James Bible

On Sunday night at Ask. I was asked a question about Richard Dawkins supposedly supporting the distribution of King James Version Bibles to all schools in England.   I hadn’t heard, and so was surprised, but suspected his reasons might have been related to the widespread respect the KJV enjoys – as far as the English language goes, it is a masterpiece.   What should we make of these things?

Firstly, the King James Version is awesome.   That can be said without reference to its literary value.   It was the sole Bible of the English speaking world for the best part of 350 years.   It was the Bible of most post-reformation English speaking preachers; it was the Bible of memory for most of the world’s English speaking Christians.   It has been an outstanding blessing in the life the Church, and in turn a blessing to the world – the means of informing the conscience and understanding of both faith and works the world over.   That it is still able to draw a readership is fantastic – the blessing rolls on and on.

Gove’s Plan

That being said, I’m not sure I entirely follow Michael Gove’s reason for its distribution.   He said, “The King James Bible has had a profound impact on our culture.   Every school pupil should have the opportunity to learn about this book and the impact it has had on our history, language, literature and democracy.”

It’s not that I disagree.   His reasoning is admirable – but it falls short.   As a preacher, I don’t want people to just learn about the Bible.   I’m not fussed about people learning the impact it has had on our culture in the past.   I’m much more in favour of people learning about the Word introduced to us in the Bible.   I’m much more concerned about a new generation being raised up to have as much of an impact on our culture as we saw in generations past.   For these things to happen, the KJV is not the best tool at our disposal.   There are plenty faithful modern translations, which have proved more accessible to people who English vocabulary is not what it was in 400 years ago.

Gove’s initiative reeks of a woolly sentimentality for the past – but it seems for him and the rest of the Con/Dem government, the Bible belongs in the History classroom, not (Religious and) Moral Education classroom, and certainly not the Modern Studies classroom.    I suspect its wrong for the Church to clutch at these straws – we need to stop living in the past.   Exposure to the Bible has to shape today’s people so that they will face today’s issues with the same conviction and boldness of heroes of the past – whether in politics like Wilberforce or Chalmers, or philosophy like Chesterton or Lewis!

Dawkins Motive

So, what about Dawkins’ support for this?   Dawkins has other motives, “People who do not know the Bible well have been gulled into thinking it is a good guide to morality.   Whatever else the Bible might be – and it really is a great work of literature – it is not a moral book and young people need to learn that important fact because they are very frequently told the opposite.”

Will reading the King James Bible tear away the facade of our claims to reading the Bible as a very moral book?

I think the content of the Book is actually secondary to Dawkins’ argument.   Dawkins is a polemical atheist – he’s generally out to convince others that gods don’t exist, and he devotes a lot of his energy to trying to dissuade people of the notion of the Christian God.   So when Dawkins says he hopes people will discover the Bible sets forth an immoral perspective, his real argument is that the God of the Bible is actually immoral, not good, but bad, and contradictory to the good God of Christianity, and hence non-existent.

He’s very quick to suggest the Bible presents a very immoral God – presumably who hates gays, encourages slavery, misogyny, patriarchy, Holy War, and a great many other nasty things.   But the problem for Dawkins is one question, “Immoral by whose standards?”   Dawkins doth protest hard – I wonder is it because the Bible’s God is not a god easy to dismiss?   He’s a God who challenges us.   He refuses to conform to our image, but constantly invites us to conform to his.

The problem isn’t that the Bible presents an immoral God – it just presents a God who calls the morals of early 21^st Century Britain “sin”.   When that verdict is passed over anything we’re doing, we of course don’t like it (Dawkins isn’t wrong there!).   But the odd thing is that sometimes it leads people to repentance, and to make peace with God.   It works out in faith.

Dawkins is wrong on another front too.   He says, “People who do not know the Bible well have been gulled into thinking it is a good guide to morality.”   He’s just wrong.   People who don’t know the Bible well have been duped by the likes of Dawkins to think the Bible is frighteningly evil.   I don’t think Dawkins realises just how post-Christian the United Kingdom has become.   If people come to the Bible with that sort of antagonism, they might just be surprised when they read stories about grace.

Much though I think Gove’s initiative is motivated by a misplaced sentimentality; much though I think the King James Bible is a literary work from a different age; much though I think people will be challenged by what they read; I also think it’s good to read the King James Bible.

If you get a chance, go for it.   If it’s hard going, it won’t hurt to find a more contemporary version.

Richard Dawkins – pleasantly surprised

Last night I had the dubious privilege of attending “a conversation with Richard Dawkins.” It was a well scripted chance for Dawkins to wind up his opponents in what the BBC dubbed the Scottish Bible Belt. If Dawkins expected a hostile crowd, he couldn’t have been more disappointed – the rapturous applause after his first “reading” gave the game way – he was preaching to the choir.

The UHI event was called “Science and the God Delusion.” Dawkins is to be admired for his promotion of science and reason – he stands against the some post-modern jibberish the church contents with. But his arguments were not those of a good debater – and I feel some of his statements were frankly contradictory. At the start of the interview, he spoke of the tremendous steps science has taken in recent years, and how science itself will soon be able to answer the question of why we are here. He was later asked about the right of science to answer the “why” questions – which he dodged, and actually said some why questions are silly and don’t deserve to be asked. The two statements were difficult to reconcile.

There was one point during the Q&A where Dawkins sense of wonder was evident. You need a sense of wonder to be a scientist. He was responding to a question about whether the latest scientific advances would put a final nail in the lid of religion. He spoke about a visit to CERN at Geneva as a “moving experience”. He spoke about the potential discoveries that such a facility could make, and was obviously excited. But, he said there was no guarantee about how someone would respond. Some would have a “religious”experience of awe at the wonder of science, while others would see these wonders as a religious experience of the glory of their god. At that moment I was convinced of the truth of Romans 1 – God’s invisible attributes (power and nature) are there to see the created world, but we suppress that truth, and exchange that glory for images and idols. My perception of Dawkins changed at that point.

Dawkins, and his followers, are demanding more from the Church. The crowd wanted to talk about pressing issues – global population explosion, climate change, resource depletion, species extinction. But we are happy to shout over their heads with self-satisfying arguments about prophecy, or confused “churchish” talk about evidence of receiving the Holy Spirit. That just isn’t where Dawkins is at – but we’re quite happy fishing in a different pool. Dawkins and co. demand our best Christian thought be applied to the issues of the day, and if coming to our level was good enough for Jesus, surely we can come down (from the lofty heights of the finer points of doctrine) to Dawkins level too?

The presence of men like Dawkins confirm so much theology I hold dear – we are created in the image of God, given to reason, creativity, and investigation. But at the same time we suppress the greatest object of wonder, and accept tawdry second rate substitutes. Dawkins could make an amazing theologian (you need a sense of wonder to by gripped by theology), but he has written God off as at best a bullying thug, before grappling with the evidence of why God might appear that way. Maybe we need to better explain our theology.

So, verdict on Dawkins – he’s not that scary, and is presenting a massive wake up call to the church, which we ignore at the peril of thousands of people who don’t know their left hand from their right, and also much cattle.