The Twilight of Atheism, Alister McGrath (on Chapter 8, p. 199f)
McGrath says that certain emphases in classic Protestantism (notably by Luther & Calvin) tended to (he says “did”) lead to atheism on the part of many. In doing so, some of his arguments are palpably false, others are misleading, and he fails to give proper recognition to the bases of the reformers concerns about iconography and liturgy in the Catholic church.
1. “Martin Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone is an example of this tendency to move away from a corporate understanding of society.” p. 199. (Nonsense; a false dichotomy.) He later (p. 200), accuses the reformers of “the divorce of the realm of the sacred and secular.” (Ditto.)
2. “Salvation was no longer determined by membership in the church, but by one’s individual relationship to God.” p. 199. (Indeed!)
3. He admits that Weber’s thesis has been widely discounted, but writes as if it hasn’t. (It has been widely discounted; see Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason.)
4. Divorcing the sacred from the secular, he says, meant that “God could not be known directly; God has to be known indirectly.” He repeats this throughout the chapter. “The absence of any expectation of encountering the divine directly through nature or in personal experience inevitably (sic!) encourages belief in a godless world—a world that lives ‘as if God did not exist.’” p. 209. (It is simply impossible to imagine Luther or Calvin thinking or saying such things.)
5. He argues—throughout the chapter—that, for the reformers, one could not expect to encounter and experience the divine in everyday life. (202) (Again, one imagines Luther and Calvin yelling a cosmic “NO!”)
6. He writes incredible things on p. 203: “Christ could only be known as an absence,” “The outcome was inevitable and predictable. God became an absence in the world,” “For Catholics—as opposed to Protestants— the world was ‘charged with the grandeur of God,’” etc.) (I continue to wonder which reformer ever held such positions.)
7. Yes (see p. 297) Protestants did de-emphasize (“fail,” to use his word) the imaginative aspects of the faith, but an honest man has to admit the possibility that the Catholics “failed,” and continue to do so, to properly appreciate the Biblical text! His entire thesis is, in my view, shipwrecked on his failure to deal with WHY the Protestants were anti-iconic in worship—which was based on their repudiation of popular Catholic heathenism which icon-centered worship produced. His admissions of this huge problem for the Catholics are weak and rare: see pp. 207 and 209-210.
8. He does not, in discussing the Orthodox and Catholic positions, ever deal with the almost total absence of any emphasis on Biblical exegesis, both in their medieval and modern congregational worship, except in some sort of ritualistic form.
9. To say that “God ceased to be a living reality in the popular Protestant imagination” (p. 211) is lunacy.
10. “Once more, it is a small step from declaring that God cannot be pictured (!) to suggesting that he cannot be conceived as a living reality in the rich imaginative life of humanity.” p. 212. (A truly amazing sentence with heavy pejorative insinuations, and a criticism, not simply of Protestantism, but of demonstrable Biblical Hebraic thought. McGrath has a pronounced tendency to superimpose general sociological categories when defining Christian worship.)
McGrath would be far better served, in my view, to say that all humans —without any reference to denominational categories or the absence thereof—are prone to divorce churchianity—liturgies or non-liturgies of every sort—from the recognition of the true and living God. To put it in a different way, morphological fundamentalisms of every sort—high church, low church, broad church, no church—are apt to set in when Christians gather. Are some worship styles more conducive to an authentic-and-Biblically-centered-existential-Christianity than others? Maybe so and maybe no. It would be, and is, an interesting debate. But if I were forced (it would take force!) to take one side as against the other, I’d take the motley and slipshod evangelical scene (I’m thinking of evangelicals as a sub-species of “Protestantism” here) against the Roman and Orthodox Catholics every time. (He himself does that in affirming Pentecostalism.) Did some Protestants fail to fully assimilate the best of Protestant theology? Yes, of course, they did and do, as many Catholics did and do with the best of Catholic theology. In my view, he utterly fails in his essential argument, i.e., basic Protestant theology provably, and justifiably, produced atheism.