Atheist Pwns Liberal Christian
If you have been around teenagers playing video games, you may have heard them say, “I was pwned” which, being translated into English, means, “I was utterly defeated by my opponent.” So, when Rod Dreher used this term in his recent post, you can only but agree.
The infamous militant publicity-hound/opportunistic atheist totally pwned a liberal Christian when he said recently:
[Unitarian;] The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?
[Hitch]: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.
He was, and is, quite entirely correct. Let’s simply face facts and insist on even the most minimal amount of integrity here when we are dealing with liberal mainline theologians who claim to be Christian, or anyone for that matter. I am quite willing to give a person the benefit of the doubt and assume the best, when it is clear that lack of knowledge or ignorance is behind errors in confession of the Faith. But a willful and knowing rejection of the basic facts of the Faith, as beautifully summarized in the Apostles’ Creed, for example, marks that person as a non-Christian. Period. End of story. Then such a person must be treated as such and prayed for and witnessed to as one who needs to come to a saving knowledge of who and what Christ is.
I actually enjoy Hitchens as a political/historical commentator quite alot. His “God is not Great” is also a good book in that he attacks what from a Confessional Lutheran perspective are false religions. In other words, if you assume that everything but the gospel is a form of mass delusion, then you have to buy most of his arguments.
In fact, I would suggest that his argument is an argument in favor of the Gospel in another way as well. Notice what the Atheists (including both Dawkins and Hitchens) always say that their after is “freedom” and when you get rid of God, then you’ve got it. But that’s not really true. What they’re doing reveals itself to simply be an elaborate way of overcoming the condemnation of the law. They think that if they get rid of God, then they can be free from his law. Nevertheless, as Oswald Bayer points out, modern Atheism and Post-modernism in general are ultra legalistic. If I believe that I can create my own destiny and therefore myself by my own choices, then I might very fail and live a worthless life by my own standards. Whether or not this turns out to be true, because I can never tell until my life is over. When it is over, then I will know, but hey, I won’t exist then.
It’s therefore not liberating- the law simply comes back with a vengeance to say “hey, you’re a failure.” What the gospel provides (and what they don’t get!) is real freedom from having to secure yourself using the law. God tells me “hey, because of Jesus, you’re life is secured ahead of time. So, now you are free to love and obey me.” Now that’s real freedom!
If you listen to the actual interview he goes on even further. THE ATHEIST says that if you don’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God then there is no reason to follow his example or to appreciate his story for ethical reasons. He really did pwn her. ROFL. The audio is here: http://www.portlandmonthlymag.com/extensions/download/?file=hitchens-sewell-audio.mp3
His attack and her epic fail take place about 9 minutes 20 seconds in.
I agree. I also know they don’t see themselves as denying anything. Back in Historical Jesus and Christ of Faith days, the idea was, things like “rose from the dead” were cultural expressions, and the early Christians, reflecting the overwhelming significance of Jesus for them, could only express it in terms of their time and place as a rising from the dead. Therefore, those for whom “rose from the dead” states a literal fact and those for whom it is an historic expression of the significance of Jesus for them alike affirm the Creed. What to us is a basic fact of faith is to them one expression of a basic fact of faith to which we have limited ourselves. I think we’ll need to consider this in how we witness.
A willful and knowing rejection of the basic facts of the Faith, as beautifully summarized in the Apostles’ Creed, for example, marks that person as a non-Christian. Period. End of story. Then such a person must be treated as such and prayed for and witnessed to as one who needs to come to a saving knowledge of who and what Christ is.”
Amen! As theologians of the cross, we need to tell it like it is and not sugar coat it. (That’s a paraphrase, of course.)
BTW, I always thought that gamers’ term was “owned.”. At least that’s what my nearly 21 year old stepson, an avid gamer, used to say. But since I see someone else using “pwned,”l guess the term has changed, as they do so quickly in teenagerese. So, how would you pronounce “pwned?” (“Pat, I’d like to buy a vowel.”) Just curious.
This exchange reminded me of another exchange. Flannery O’Connor in a letters (Letters of Flannery O’Connor: the Habit of Being) tells the story of going to dinner with author Mary McCarthy and her husband. O’Connor said of McCarthy, “She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual”. O’Connor tells that as this dinner proceeded toward morning,
“…the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”
One more: sometime ago a LCMS campus minister posted this you-tube vid by Penn Gillette (Penn and Teller) who is an atheist about receiving a Bible: like Hitchens, Penn gets it more than many Christians.
http://www.youtube.com/watch#playnext=1&playnext_from=TL&videos=Mz95nPHZTKw&v=ZhG-tkQ_Q2w
Rev. Yount,
Same pronunciation, alternate spelling. It comes from gamers hastily typing in the word in an in game chat. ‘o’ and ‘p’ are right next to each other on the keyboard.