When the Serpent tempted Eve in Genesis 3, he told her that she could be her own god. That claim is false, but in its own way it is profoundly illuminating. Two chapters earlier in Genesis we are informed that Adam and Eve were created in God’s “image” and “likeness.” Human beings are “like” God in an extremely important way: they are “imagers” of the true God. Only an “imager” of God can make the fatal move of trying to be a god. My favorite heretics are thinkers who perversely acknowledge that subtlety of the serpentine deception.
The great John Courtney Murray put it nicely in his marvelous book, The Problem of God. These kinds of thinkers insist on bringing explorations of the human condition back to the “biblical mode.” He admired them for the way they directly pose for us the fundamental questions: “Which is the myth and which is the reality? Is the myth in Nietzsche or in the New Testament? . . . Is it in Sartre of Paris or in Paul of Tarsus?”
Sartre seems to have gone out of style in contemporary intellectual circles, and Nietzsche has mainly been taken over by the “literary criticism” folks. Maybe this is a good time to bring them back into the broader conversation. Perspectives that are both false and illuminating are in short supply these days.
I enjoyed this article, but it did occur to me that if heretics are a gift, TEC must be the most blessed organization in human history.