Sam Harris’s Letter to A Christian Nation was given to me by Rev. James S. Petty. Many have read this slim volume. I recommend it as food for thought.
I have also written Mr. Harris about his work. I share the substance of it below:
Dear Mr. Harris,
Accompanying this letter please find gift volumes from my work on the synoptic Gospels. I am sending these to you after reading your Letter to a Christian Nation. I have not yet read The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, which I understand sets forth your views more comprehensively.
I was both impressed and dismayed by your Letter to a Christian Nation. I was impressed with your intellectual honesty and rigor in approaching with a critical mind some of the same issues that are often explored in my own faith walk, including in the adult Christian education class I teach at Trinity Episcopal Church in Asheville, North Carolina. I was dismayed, however, by what I perceived to be a simplistic understanding of Christianity.
While you certainly distinguish between moderates and liberals on the one hand, and conservatives and fundamentalists on the other, I do not believe you grasp fully the way in which scripture forms the basis for telling the story of a people’s relationship with God as they understand him. Your book’s expression of what Christianity means seems principally bound up in how literalistic or legalistic interpretations of the Bible predominate in some circles, even though you acknowledge there are other methods of interpretation.
If you look at the difference between atheism and theism, you can see points on either side. Broken down to basics, one can observe the universe and exercise his reason to conclude that there is a divine Being or that there is not. Stated differently, philosophy can reach either conclusion.
One can also point to both sides of that debate and find truly brilliant minds. On the side that has concluded there is a God, I would list Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Jesus, Paul, Epictetus, Augustine, Aquinas, Newton, Luther, Einstein, Tillich, and Niebuhr (just to mention some names in the western world). I am also of the impression that increasing numbers of physicists and astronomers are wading in the waters of theism. Their intellectual capacities are certainly at least the equal to some of the great atheistic minds in western philosophical tradition, including Epicurus, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Sartre, and the scores of hundreds of scientists who have not accepted that a deity exists because of the lack of the empirical verifiability.
That said, the religious side of the equation (except to the extent plagued by fundamentalist dogma) carries a more hopeful view of the world – albeit one where some things are left to mystery, paradox, and other concepts bigger than our own minds can grasp. A friend of a friend looks at the opposite reasoning and conclusions, such as yours, and says that it has “pushed reason to its limits.”
The enclosed volumes are my most significant contribution to date toward the discussion about interpretation of some of the central texts of Christian faith. They draw a way that is neither literalistic nor legalistic, and that is focused on understanding scripture through the lenses of history, theology, literature, and community context. These tools to interpret scripture are intended to be helpful to the faithful lay person with a serious desire to understand more about the Gospels.
You are certainly welcome to read them with that or any approach in mind. My hope is that you view them as an opportunity to understand the breadth, depth, and diversity of Christian thought. Let’s call it a curative measure against an understanding and perception found primarily in the dark and fanatical voices whose noise dominates the discussion: aggressive fundamentalism.
Very truly yours,
Edward L. Bleynat, Jr.