Hitchens and Hagiography

The Hitch is dead. Nathan sums it up well,

Christopher Hitchens died today. He was a brilliant and acerbic polemicist who played pretty free and easy with exactly what historically orthodox, Bible based Christianity looks like in his most popular work God Is Not Good, but he was by all accounts a charming, debonair, raconteur type who meant what he said, and said what he thought, in a manner that belied his significant gifts. By all accounts, including his own, his battle with cancer was difficult, but he conducted himself with the poise, gravitas, and wit that endeared him to readers around the world.

Douglas Wilson, who debated Hitchens and came to consider him a friend, has a moving tribute in Christianity Today,

He was actually an affable and pleasant dinner companion, and fully capable of being the perfect gentleman. He was fully aware of the authority an enfant terrible could have, provided he played his cards right, and this was a strategy that Hitchens employed very well indeed. One man who delivers a terrible insult is banned from television for life, and another man, who does the same thing, has people lining up with invitations and microphones. In case anyone is wondering, Christopher was that second man.

I'm not sure that's entirely justified. Hitchen's remarks on the death of Jerry Falwell were not worthy of him.

Now don't get me wrong, I was no fan of Falwell but there's a limit. As so many of the pop-Atheists (both published and their disciples) demonstrate consistently, their "sophisticated" arguments on the immorality of religion don't come out of any great virtue themselves. And the problem is, I would suggest, that a lot of the helpful things that Hitchens had to say in that interview were utterly undermined but the manner in which he fired a salvo while Falwell's body was still warm. It only takes a brief look at teh twitterz to see that birds of a feather flock together. HItchen's death became another excuse to kick Falwell's corpse.

Which is why a Christian response to the death of someone like HItchens is (or at least should be) so staggeringly different. Of course, the model is set for us by Jesus Himself,

Luke 23:34 Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

There is a striking paradox at the heart of the Christian response to the unbeliever, particularly the virulent anti-believer like Hitchens. On the one hand, we recognise that they are responsible for their own actions, their sin, and yet we also see that, as Jesus put, "everyone who sins is a slave to sin". We are utterly culpable, yet at the same time utterly incapable of saving ourselves. Surely Hitchens did not truly know the extent to which his words and actions put him in jeopardy nor the enormity of the rebellion he was part of. So the right response is sadness. Sadness as what sin has done to the world. It takes a great mind like Hitchens' and subverts it, everyone a Judas.

Wilson calls us to be careful about our response,

I caution Christians against two errors—and both of them are errors of speculation. The possibility of last minute conversions must never be turned into actual last minute conversions. No one is wished into Heaven. There have been too many unbelievers preached into Heaven at the funeral, and we ought not to give way to the false tenderness of that impulse. At the same time, the likelihood that Christopher never called on Christ should not be turned into a hard-line dogmatic statement, followed by "good riddance." No one is wished into Hell either. We ought not to greet the news of Christopher's death the way he greeted the death of Jerry Falwell's, for example.

On a similar vein, Nathan again,

The Christian attempt to respond to the death of an interlocutor by extending grace to them, and naming them as potentially one of the saints, is nobly intended, but was odd when Steve Jobs died. And is downright insane when it comes to Hitchens.

Indeed. Downright insane. Hitchens, not least because he remained in many ways a man of basic integrity (or at least was consistent), never gave any indication of doing anything other than raging against the dying of the light, and all the more against the one who first spoke light into being, let alone gave him every breath he breathed.

Could Hitchens have converted? It's always possible, because with God everything is. But let's be clear - by every evidence it's highly unlikely. So what is it that makes us want it to be true? In some ways it's a good and godly desire that all be saved, but perhaps it's because we fail to truly get to grips with how awful sin is - so we look for some redeeming feature in a man, even someone so implacably opposed to Jesus of Nazareth as the Hitch as. We'll slip into the deepest arminianism, let alone pelagianism, rather than face up to the reality of depravity. We look within the man for his "goodness" to avoid the far more confronting view of his sin. Of our sin. 

But the answer does not lie there. It lies, instead, in God Himself. God who foreknows, elects, calls, justifies and glorifies is the one to whom we entrust all those who die. He is the judge of the all the earth who will do right and we would do well not to second guess Him.

Rather, perhaps, just a day to mourn with those who mourn - especially those who mourn with no hope.

Vale Christopher Hitchens