In my copy of the New Testament I underline passages which take my fancy. Nearly all of them are about the deceitfulness of the cares of this world and of riches, about how concupiscence and vanity separate us from God, about glorying in tribulation which brings patience, experience and hope, about the flesh lusting against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, these being contrary to one another so that we cannot do the things that we would do, and so on. It is difficult to think of any sentiments which would be more intrinsically unsympathetic in most clerical circles. They are, I should say, about the most unpopular sentences it is possible to utter today; at religious gatherings they cause malaise and irritation; on radio and television panels derision and incredulity. When I use them I am often accused of insincerity or affectation, so rooted are the opposite assumptions - that by caring about the world we shall make it better, that we must aim collectively to get richer in order to get happier and happier, that the unrestrained satisfaction of our earthly hopes and desires is the way to physical, mental and spiritual contentment.
In the face of the otherworldliness which I still unfashionably find in the Gospels, as far as I am concerned the whole edifice of twentieth-century materialism - and the utopian hopes that go therewith - falls flat on it face. One is delivered from the myth of progress. The terrible vision of a Scandinavian-American paradise, with longer lives, more and better aphrodisiacs and more leisure and amenities for all, dissolves into nightmare, awaking from which one advances gingerly upon the sublime truth that to live it is necessary to die, that a life can only be kept by being lost - propositions which strike contemporary minds as pessimistic, but which seem to me optimistic to the point of insanity, implying as they do, that it is possible for mere man, with his brief life and stunted vision, to aspire after a universal understanding and a universal love. Is this being a Christian?
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Am I A Christian?
Books like Resurrection or The Brothers Karamazov give me an almost overpowering sense of how uniquely marvellous a Christian way of looking at life is, and a passionate desire to share it. Likewise, listening to Bach, reading Pascal, looking at Chartres Cathedral or any of the masterpieces of Christian art and thought. As for the Gospels and Epistles, I find them(especially St John) irresistibly wonderful as they reduce the jostling egos of now - my own among them - to the feeble crackling flicker of burning sticks against a majestic noonday sun. Is it not extraordinary to the point of being a miracle, that so loose and ill-constructed a narrative in an antique translation of a dubious text should after so many centuries still have power to quell and dominate a restless, opinionated, over-exercised and under-nourished twentieth-century mind?
Learned theologians bend their powerful minds to demonstrate that God is dead and his church, therefore, become a useless excrescence.
One may marvel that, when pretty well every item of Christian belief and of Christian ethics has been thus subjected to some degree of denigration and attack by those ostensibly responsible for upholding and propagating them, congregations of sorts nonetheless continue to assemble in parish churches on Sunday mornings, and ordinands and novices, though in dwindling numbers, continue to come forward with seemingly authentic vocations. The church of Jesus Christ has to stagger on under the guidance of those who increasingly sympathize with, when they do not actually countenance, every attack on its doctrines, integrity and traditional practice. By one of our time's larger ironies, ecumenicalism is triumphant just when there is nothing to be ecumenical about; the various religious bodies are likely to find it easy to join together only because, believing little, they correspondingly differ about little.
Institutional Christianity, it seems to me, is now in total disarray, and visibly decomposing, to the point that, short of a miracle, it can never be put together again with any semblance of order or credibility. In their present state of decomposition the various Christian denominations are not even an impediment to Christian belief but just a joke.
The surrender of institutional Christianity to the promoters of a kingdom of heaven on earth has been so abject, the assumptions of scientific materialism are so widely accepted and arrogantly stated, that an aspiring Christian today is left in a kind of catacomb of his own making, utterly remote from the debates and discussions going on around him, whether about "permissive morality" or about the basic dogma of the Christian faith.
Learned theologians bend their powerful minds to demonstrate that God is dead and his church, therefore, become a useless excrescence.
One may marvel that, when pretty well every item of Christian belief and of Christian ethics has been thus subjected to some degree of denigration and attack by those ostensibly responsible for upholding and propagating them, congregations of sorts nonetheless continue to assemble in parish churches on Sunday mornings, and ordinands and novices, though in dwindling numbers, continue to come forward with seemingly authentic vocations. The church of Jesus Christ has to stagger on under the guidance of those who increasingly sympathize with, when they do not actually countenance, every attack on its doctrines, integrity and traditional practice. By one of our time's larger ironies, ecumenicalism is triumphant just when there is nothing to be ecumenical about; the various religious bodies are likely to find it easy to join together only because, believing little, they correspondingly differ about little.
Institutional Christianity, it seems to me, is now in total disarray, and visibly decomposing, to the point that, short of a miracle, it can never be put together again with any semblance of order or credibility. In their present state of decomposition the various Christian denominations are not even an impediment to Christian belief but just a joke.
The surrender of institutional Christianity to the promoters of a kingdom of heaven on earth has been so abject, the assumptions of scientific materialism are so widely accepted and arrogantly stated, that an aspiring Christian today is left in a kind of catacomb of his own making, utterly remote from the debates and discussions going on around him, whether about "permissive morality" or about the basic dogma of the Christian faith.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Revisiting Jesus Rediscovered
You are to be found in the lowest, darkest depths, and that all who find You are thereby transported to the loftiest, brightest heights.
The ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth. As long as we are aliens we cannot forget our true homeland, which is that other kingdom You proclaimed.
It was bad enough when the clergy identified themselves with the social and political status quo; now that they are ready to support any deviation from it, and champion anyone who can produce credentials, however dubious, of being down-trodden and oppressed, it is even worse.
I have come to regard clerical Christianity and its officers as totally farcical - as Kierkegaard puts it, a folding screen behind which the Christian evades the real seriousness of being a Christian. Momentarily, I have to admit, with Protestant romanticism I toyed with the notion that the Roman Catholic Church, with its longer tradition, tougher discipline and more rigid doctrine, would prove an exception, and manage to resist the Gadarene slide on which the other denominations had embarked so blithely and disastrously. However mistaken I was!
The tide of the twentieth century was flowing in a different direction altogether. It was the picture palaces, their fronts so brilliantly lighted, inside so mysteriously dark, that provided our true churches and chapels.
Only as children of God are we equal; all other claims to equality - social, economic, racial, intellectual, sexual - only serve in practice to intensify inequality.
In this quest for You we look without finding and find without looking.
Preoccupation with ritual has always seemed to me comparable, in matters of worship, with preoccupation with erotic techniques in matters of sex.
The imagination recoils from the prizes or toys of a materialistic society. Who but some half-witted oil sheik or popular actor can go on desiring sleek yachts or motor cars or white villas perched above yellow sand? Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society, with its own mysteries-this is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me!-and its own sacred texts and scriptures-the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and the unjust alike, drenching us, blinding us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life!
It was padding down the streets of Moscow that the other dream-the kingdom of heaven on earth-dissolved for me, never to be revived. Those gray anonymous figures, likewise padding about the streets, seemed infinitely remote, withdrawn, for ever strangers, yet somehow near and dear. The gray streets were paradise, the eyeless buildings the many mansions of which heaven is composed.
How infinitely preferable it is to be abhorred, rather than embraced, by those in authority. Where the distinction between God and Caesar is so abundantly clear, no one in his senses - or out of them for that matter - is likely to suggest that any good purpose would be served by arranging a dialogue between the two of them. In the Communist countries an unmistakable and unbridgable abyses divides the kingdoms of the earth and Your kingdom, with no crazed clerics gibbering and grimacing in the intervening no-man's land. It provides the perfect circumstances for the Christian faith to bloom anew. I look eastwards, not westwards, for the new Star of Bethlehem.
At the intersection of time and eternity - nailed there - You confront us; a perpetual reminder that, living, we die and, dying, we live. An incarnation wonderful to contemplate; the light of the world, indeed.
Though in terms of history the darkness falls, blacking out us and our world, You have overcome history. You came as light into the world, that whoever believed in You should not remain in darkness. The promise stands forever. Your light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Nor ever will.
The ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth. As long as we are aliens we cannot forget our true homeland, which is that other kingdom You proclaimed.
It was bad enough when the clergy identified themselves with the social and political status quo; now that they are ready to support any deviation from it, and champion anyone who can produce credentials, however dubious, of being down-trodden and oppressed, it is even worse.
I have come to regard clerical Christianity and its officers as totally farcical - as Kierkegaard puts it, a folding screen behind which the Christian evades the real seriousness of being a Christian. Momentarily, I have to admit, with Protestant romanticism I toyed with the notion that the Roman Catholic Church, with its longer tradition, tougher discipline and more rigid doctrine, would prove an exception, and manage to resist the Gadarene slide on which the other denominations had embarked so blithely and disastrously. However mistaken I was!
The tide of the twentieth century was flowing in a different direction altogether. It was the picture palaces, their fronts so brilliantly lighted, inside so mysteriously dark, that provided our true churches and chapels.
Only as children of God are we equal; all other claims to equality - social, economic, racial, intellectual, sexual - only serve in practice to intensify inequality.
In this quest for You we look without finding and find without looking.
Preoccupation with ritual has always seemed to me comparable, in matters of worship, with preoccupation with erotic techniques in matters of sex.
The imagination recoils from the prizes or toys of a materialistic society. Who but some half-witted oil sheik or popular actor can go on desiring sleek yachts or motor cars or white villas perched above yellow sand? Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society, with its own mysteries-this is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me!-and its own sacred texts and scriptures-the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and the unjust alike, drenching us, blinding us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life!
It was padding down the streets of Moscow that the other dream-the kingdom of heaven on earth-dissolved for me, never to be revived. Those gray anonymous figures, likewise padding about the streets, seemed infinitely remote, withdrawn, for ever strangers, yet somehow near and dear. The gray streets were paradise, the eyeless buildings the many mansions of which heaven is composed.
How infinitely preferable it is to be abhorred, rather than embraced, by those in authority. Where the distinction between God and Caesar is so abundantly clear, no one in his senses - or out of them for that matter - is likely to suggest that any good purpose would be served by arranging a dialogue between the two of them. In the Communist countries an unmistakable and unbridgable abyses divides the kingdoms of the earth and Your kingdom, with no crazed clerics gibbering and grimacing in the intervening no-man's land. It provides the perfect circumstances for the Christian faith to bloom anew. I look eastwards, not westwards, for the new Star of Bethlehem.
At the intersection of time and eternity - nailed there - You confront us; a perpetual reminder that, living, we die and, dying, we live. An incarnation wonderful to contemplate; the light of the world, indeed.
Though in terms of history the darkness falls, blacking out us and our world, You have overcome history. You came as light into the world, that whoever believed in You should not remain in darkness. The promise stands forever. Your light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Nor ever will.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Honest to God - redux
It is exceedingly hard to abandon the mental structure upon which one has built their life and worldview. Change is a process and takes time as one wrestles with the issues. Even if one wants to move along, there are vestiges of the prior that will always linger. It is a journey of self discovery as much as it is a journey of knowledge discovery.
The cross is where history and life, legend and reality, time and eternity, intersect. The various moral and theological and sociological disputes of the day, however progressively resolved with ecclesiastical connivance, have nothing to say to a very real spiritual hunger that exists deep within the soul of man. There is no comfort in the thought that God is dead, or that mankind has come of age...the only means of satisfying that hunger remains the bread of life that Jesus offered.
The cross is where history and life, legend and reality, time and eternity, intersect. The various moral and theological and sociological disputes of the day, however progressively resolved with ecclesiastical connivance, have nothing to say to a very real spiritual hunger that exists deep within the soul of man. There is no comfort in the thought that God is dead, or that mankind has come of age...the only means of satisfying that hunger remains the bread of life that Jesus offered.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Recasting the Mould (contd)
But the Christian affirmation is not simply that love ought to be the last word about life, but that, despite all appearances, it is...It is frankly incredible unless the love revealed in Jesus is indeed the nature of ultimate reality, unless he is a window through the surface of things into God. Christianity stands or falls by revelation, by Christ as the disclosure of the final truth not merely about human nature but about all nature and all reality. The Christian's faith cannot rest in the capacities of man. The Christian's faith is in Christ as the revelation, the laying bare, of the very heart and and being of ultimate reality.
Our impasse is primarily an intellectual one: 'It does not immediately or directly affect Christian faith or Christian worship or the conduct of the Christian life. God is still at work. The old formulas continue to be used: they serve in worship, the comprise pictorial imagery useful for meditation, and they mark the continuity of our faith and devotion with that of our Christian ancestors. They preserve what may be meaningless to one generation but meaningful to the next. Our search is fides quaerens intellectum: and so long as they search can and does continue, the insufficiency of our theology need not affect Christian faith or conduct or worship'.
Without the constant discipline of theological thought, asking what we really mean by the symbols, purging out the dead myths, and being utterly honest before God with ourselves and the world, the Church can quickly become obscurantist and its faith and conduct and worship increasingly formal and hollow.
That Christianity should be equated in the public mind, inside as well as outside the Church, with 'organized religion' merely shows how far we have departed from the New Testament. For the last thing the Church exists to be is an organization for the religious. Its charter is to be the servant to the world. I would see much more hope for the Church if it was organized not to defend the interests of religion against the inroads of the state but to equip Christians by the quality and power of its community life, to enter with their 'secret discipline' into all the exhilarating, and dangerous, secular strivings of our day, there to follow and to find the workings of God.
For the true radical is not the man who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy on these lines to reform the church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church to the judgement of the Kingdom, to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.
'There are times when we can never meet the future with sufficient elasticity fo mind, especially if we are locked in the contemporary systems of thought. We can do worse than remember a principle which both gives us a firm Rock and leaves us maximum elasticity for our minds: the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted'. Herbert Butterfield.
The basic commitment to Christ may have been in the past-and may be for most of us still-buttressed and fortified by many lesser commitments-to a particular projection of God, a particular 'myth' fo the Incarnation, a particular code of morals, a particular pattern of religion. Without the buttresses it may look as if all would collapse. Nevertheless, we must beware of clinging to the buttresses instead of to Christ. And still more must we beware of insisting on the buttresses as the way to Christ. For to growing numbers in our generation they are barriers rather than supports.
Our impasse is primarily an intellectual one: 'It does not immediately or directly affect Christian faith or Christian worship or the conduct of the Christian life. God is still at work. The old formulas continue to be used: they serve in worship, the comprise pictorial imagery useful for meditation, and they mark the continuity of our faith and devotion with that of our Christian ancestors. They preserve what may be meaningless to one generation but meaningful to the next. Our search is fides quaerens intellectum: and so long as they search can and does continue, the insufficiency of our theology need not affect Christian faith or conduct or worship'.
Without the constant discipline of theological thought, asking what we really mean by the symbols, purging out the dead myths, and being utterly honest before God with ourselves and the world, the Church can quickly become obscurantist and its faith and conduct and worship increasingly formal and hollow.
That Christianity should be equated in the public mind, inside as well as outside the Church, with 'organized religion' merely shows how far we have departed from the New Testament. For the last thing the Church exists to be is an organization for the religious. Its charter is to be the servant to the world. I would see much more hope for the Church if it was organized not to defend the interests of religion against the inroads of the state but to equip Christians by the quality and power of its community life, to enter with their 'secret discipline' into all the exhilarating, and dangerous, secular strivings of our day, there to follow and to find the workings of God.
For the true radical is not the man who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy on these lines to reform the church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church to the judgement of the Kingdom, to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.
'There are times when we can never meet the future with sufficient elasticity fo mind, especially if we are locked in the contemporary systems of thought. We can do worse than remember a principle which both gives us a firm Rock and leaves us maximum elasticity for our minds: the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted'. Herbert Butterfield.
The basic commitment to Christ may have been in the past-and may be for most of us still-buttressed and fortified by many lesser commitments-to a particular projection of God, a particular 'myth' fo the Incarnation, a particular code of morals, a particular pattern of religion. Without the buttresses it may look as if all would collapse. Nevertheless, we must beware of clinging to the buttresses instead of to Christ. And still more must we beware of insisting on the buttresses as the way to Christ. For to growing numbers in our generation they are barriers rather than supports.
Recasting the Mould
'Our whole nineteen hundred year old Christian preaching and theology rests upon the 'religious premise' of man...But if one day it becomes apparent that this a priori 'premise' simply does not exist, but was an historical and temporary form of self expression, ie. we reach a stage of being radically without religion-and I think this is the case already, else how is it, for instance, that this war, unlike any of those before it, is not calling forth any 'religious' reaction?-what does this mean for Christianity'? It means that the linchpin is removed from the whole structure of our Christianity to date'. Bonhoeffer
We are just beginning to get used to the idea that 'Christendom' may be a historically conditioned phenomenon. It will doubtless seem to some that I have by implication abandoned the Christian faith and practice altogether. On the contrary, I believe that unless we are prepared for the kind of revolution of which I have spoken it will come to be abandoned. And that will be because it is moulded, in the form we know it, by a cast of thought that belongs to a past age.
'In the law', says Paul to the Jews, 'you see the very shape of knowledge and truth'. That was their glory-and their liability. They had it all-the very 'oracles of God', 'the splendor of the divine presence'-and yet none of it possessed any validity for them except within a certain fixed 'pattern of religion': the Law was the mould that shaped everything into acceptability. Paul, indeed, will not hear a word against the Law as such: it is 'holy and just and good'. And yet the time came when it was to prove the stumbling block to knowing the very God whose truth it existed to shape. Bonhoeffer as we have seen regarded "the religious premise' today as comparable with the presupposition of the Law which stood between the Jew and the Gospel. What looks like being required of us, reluctant as we may be for the effort involved, is a radically new mould of Christian belief and practice. Such a recasting will leave the fundamental truth of the Gospel unaffected. But it means that we have to be prepared for everything to go into the melting-even our most cherished religious categories and moral absolutes. And the first thing we must be ready to let go is our image of God himself.
Every new religious truth comes as the destroyer of some other god, as an attack upon that which men hold most sacred. It is easy for us to persuade ourselves that this is a process which lies now in the past, that Christianity has supplanted the idols of heathenism and that we now know the one true God. But in fact the debate staged on the Areopagus is a debate that is never closed. It has constantly to be reopened, as one idol is knocked down, only to be replaced by another. For the Christian gospel is in perpetual conflict with the images of God set up in the minds of men, even of Christian men, as they seek in each generation to encompass his meaning. These images fulfil an essential purpose, to focus the unknowable, to enclose the inexhaustible, so that ordinary men and women can get their minds round God and have something on which to fix their imagination and prayers. But as soon as they become a substitute for God, as soon as they become God, so that what is not embodied in the image is excluded or denied, then we have a new idolatry and once more the word of judgment has to fall.
I have a great deal of sympathy for those who call themselves atheists. For the God they are tilting against, the God they honestly feel they cannot believe in, is so often an image of God instead of God, a way of conceiving him which has become an idol.
We are just beginning to get used to the idea that 'Christendom' may be a historically conditioned phenomenon. It will doubtless seem to some that I have by implication abandoned the Christian faith and practice altogether. On the contrary, I believe that unless we are prepared for the kind of revolution of which I have spoken it will come to be abandoned. And that will be because it is moulded, in the form we know it, by a cast of thought that belongs to a past age.
'In the law', says Paul to the Jews, 'you see the very shape of knowledge and truth'. That was their glory-and their liability. They had it all-the very 'oracles of God', 'the splendor of the divine presence'-and yet none of it possessed any validity for them except within a certain fixed 'pattern of religion': the Law was the mould that shaped everything into acceptability. Paul, indeed, will not hear a word against the Law as such: it is 'holy and just and good'. And yet the time came when it was to prove the stumbling block to knowing the very God whose truth it existed to shape. Bonhoeffer as we have seen regarded "the religious premise' today as comparable with the presupposition of the Law which stood between the Jew and the Gospel. What looks like being required of us, reluctant as we may be for the effort involved, is a radically new mould of Christian belief and practice. Such a recasting will leave the fundamental truth of the Gospel unaffected. But it means that we have to be prepared for everything to go into the melting-even our most cherished religious categories and moral absolutes. And the first thing we must be ready to let go is our image of God himself.
Every new religious truth comes as the destroyer of some other god, as an attack upon that which men hold most sacred. It is easy for us to persuade ourselves that this is a process which lies now in the past, that Christianity has supplanted the idols of heathenism and that we now know the one true God. But in fact the debate staged on the Areopagus is a debate that is never closed. It has constantly to be reopened, as one idol is knocked down, only to be replaced by another. For the Christian gospel is in perpetual conflict with the images of God set up in the minds of men, even of Christian men, as they seek in each generation to encompass his meaning. These images fulfil an essential purpose, to focus the unknowable, to enclose the inexhaustible, so that ordinary men and women can get their minds round God and have something on which to fix their imagination and prayers. But as soon as they become a substitute for God, as soon as they become God, so that what is not embodied in the image is excluded or denied, then we have a new idolatry and once more the word of judgment has to fall.
I have a great deal of sympathy for those who call themselves atheists. For the God they are tilting against, the God they honestly feel they cannot believe in, is so often an image of God instead of God, a way of conceiving him which has become an idol.
The New Morality (contd)
Tillich seeks to push beyond 'supranaturalism and naturalism' to a third position, in which they transcendent is nothing external or 'out there' but is encountered in, with and under the Thou of all finite relationships as their ultimate depth and ground and meaning. In ethics this means accepting as the basis of moral judgments the actual concrete relationship in all its particularity, refusing to subordinate it to any universal norm or to treat it merely as a case, but yet, in the depth of that unique relationship, meeting and responding to the claims of the sacred, the holy and the absolutely unconditional.
Life in Christ Jesus, in the new being, in the Spirit, means having no absolutes but his love, being totally uncommitted in every other respect but totally committed in this. The claim of the Christ may come to others, as indeed it often comes to the Christian, incognito: but since it is the claim of home, of the personal ground of our very being, it does not come as anything foreign. Love alone, because, as it were, it has a built-in moral compass, enabling it to 'home' intuitively upon the deepest need of the other, can allow itself to be directed completely by the situation. It is able to embrace an ethic of radical responsiveness, meeting every situation on its own merits, with no prescriptive laws. For this reason it is the only ethic which offers a point of constancy in a world of flux and yet remains absolutely free for, and free over, the changing situation. It is prepared to see every moment as a fresh creation from God's hand demanding its own and perhaps wholly unprecedented response.
Brunner argues that Christian ethics is not a scheme of codified conduct. It is a purposive effort to relate love to a world of relativities through a casuistry obedient to love. It is a radical 'ethic of the situation' with prescribed-except love. It is love which is the constitutive principle-and law, at most, is only the regulative one, if it is even that.
It is of course a highly dangerous ethic and the representatives of supranaturalistic legalism will, like the Pharisees, always fear it. Seeing it a licence to laxity and to the broadest possible living. But love's gate is strict and narrow and its requirements infinitely deeper and more penetrating. This 'new morality' is, of course, none other than the old morality, just as the new commandment is the old, yet ever fresh, commandment of love. But love is the end of the law precisely because it does respect persons-the unique, individual person-unconditionally. 'The absoluteness of love is its power to go into the concrete situation, to discover what is demanded by the predicament of the concrete to which it turns'. Whatever the pointers of the law to the demands of love, there can for the Christian be no 'packaged' moral judgments-for persons are more important even than 'standards'.
Life in Christ Jesus, in the new being, in the Spirit, means having no absolutes but his love, being totally uncommitted in every other respect but totally committed in this. The claim of the Christ may come to others, as indeed it often comes to the Christian, incognito: but since it is the claim of home, of the personal ground of our very being, it does not come as anything foreign. Love alone, because, as it were, it has a built-in moral compass, enabling it to 'home' intuitively upon the deepest need of the other, can allow itself to be directed completely by the situation. It is able to embrace an ethic of radical responsiveness, meeting every situation on its own merits, with no prescriptive laws. For this reason it is the only ethic which offers a point of constancy in a world of flux and yet remains absolutely free for, and free over, the changing situation. It is prepared to see every moment as a fresh creation from God's hand demanding its own and perhaps wholly unprecedented response.
Brunner argues that Christian ethics is not a scheme of codified conduct. It is a purposive effort to relate love to a world of relativities through a casuistry obedient to love. It is a radical 'ethic of the situation' with prescribed-except love. It is love which is the constitutive principle-and law, at most, is only the regulative one, if it is even that.
It is of course a highly dangerous ethic and the representatives of supranaturalistic legalism will, like the Pharisees, always fear it. Seeing it a licence to laxity and to the broadest possible living. But love's gate is strict and narrow and its requirements infinitely deeper and more penetrating. This 'new morality' is, of course, none other than the old morality, just as the new commandment is the old, yet ever fresh, commandment of love. But love is the end of the law precisely because it does respect persons-the unique, individual person-unconditionally. 'The absoluteness of love is its power to go into the concrete situation, to discover what is demanded by the predicament of the concrete to which it turns'. Whatever the pointers of the law to the demands of love, there can for the Christian be no 'packaged' moral judgments-for persons are more important even than 'standards'.
The New Morality
It is impossible to reassess one's doctrine of God without bringing one's view of morality into the same melting pot. For assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love - about the ultimate ground and meaning of personal relationships. There is no need to prove that a revolution is required in morals. It has long since broken out; and it is no 'reluctant revolution'. There are plenty of voices within the church greeting it with vociferous dismay. The religious sanctions are losing their strength, the moral landmarks are disappearing beneath the flood, the nation is in danger. This is the end term of the apostasy from Christianity: the fathers rejected the doctrine, the children have abandoned the morals. The great defection from God, is to be discerned, and the more they bring in and make use of God and Christ in opposition to this trend, the more the trend itself considers itself to be anti-Christian. The old way of thinking that right and wrong are derived 'at second hand' from God. They are the commandments which God gives, the laws which he lays down (as with Moses on Mt Sinai). And supranaturalist reasons - that God or Christ have pronounced it 'a sin' - have force, and even meaning, for none but a diminishing religious remnant. But equally there is no suggestion in the Gospels that the Christian ethic is for 'the religious' only. It is for all men: it is based upon the nature of man, and for the foundation of his teaching on marriage Jesus specifically went behind Moses and the Law to creation. It is for all men universally: it is not for homo religiosus.
The moral precepts of Jesus are not intended to be understood legalistically, as prescribing what all Christians must do, whatever the circumstances, and pronouncing certain courses of action universally right and other universally wrong. They are not legislation laying down what love always demands of every one: they are illustrations of what love may at any moment require of anyone. They are, as it were, parables of the Kingdom in its moral claims-flashlight pictures of the uncompromising demand which the Kingdom must make upon any who would respond to it. This insistence upon the parabolic character of the ethical sayings of Jesus should deliver us from the danger of taking them either as literal injunctions for any situation or as universal principles for every situation. The sermon on the Mount is relevant not because it provides us with an infallible guide to the moral life, but because as Martin Dibelius put it, 'we are able to be transformed by it'. What the supranaturalist ethic does is to subordinate the actual individual relationship to some universal, whether metaphysical or moral, external to it. The decision is not reached, the judgment is not made, on the empirical realities of the particular concrete relationship between the persons concerned. Man is made for the sabbath, and not the sabbath for man. Be the individual circumstances what they will, the moral law is the same-for all men and for all times. It is imposed on the relationship from without, from above: the function of casuistry is to 'apply' it to the case in question. It stands for 'absolute', 'objective' moral values and presents a dyke against the floods of relativism and subjectivism. And yet this heteronomy is also its profound weakness. Except to the man who believes in 'the God out there' it has no compelling sanction or self-authenticating foundation. It cannot answer the question 'Why is this wrong?' in terms of the intrinsic realities of the situation itself.
The revolt in the field of ethics from supranaturalism to naturalism, from heteronomy to autonomy, has been with us so long that we need not spend much time on it. It began with the magnificent grandeur of Kant's autonomous ideal, perhaps the greatest and most objective of all ethical systems. But this is really only secularized deism-and not completely secularized at that; for though Kant dispensed with the hypothesis of God to account for the source of the moral law, he brought him back, as a very crude deus ex machina, to ensure the eventual coincidence of virtue and happiness. Kant's moral idealism was living on religious capital. As this ran out or was rejected, it came to be replaced by every kind of ethical relativism-utilitarianism, evolutionary naturalism, existentialism. These systems, so different in themselves, have this in common: they have taken their stand, quite correctly, against any subordination of the concrete needs of the individual situation to an alien universal norm. But in the process any objective or unconditional standard has disappeared in a morass of relativism and subjectivism. Tillich sums up the situation in words that refer to culture in general but apply just as much to its ethical aspect:
'Autonomy is able to live as long as it can draw from the religious tradition of the past, from the remnants of a lost theonomy. But more and more it loses this spiritual foundation. It becomes emptier, more formalistic, or more factual and is driven towards skepticism and cynicism, towards the loss of meaning and purpose. The history of autonomous cultures in history of a continuous waste of spiritual substance. At the end of this process autonomy turns back to the lost theonomy with impotent longing, or it looks forward to a new theonomy.'
The moral precepts of Jesus are not intended to be understood legalistically, as prescribing what all Christians must do, whatever the circumstances, and pronouncing certain courses of action universally right and other universally wrong. They are not legislation laying down what love always demands of every one: they are illustrations of what love may at any moment require of anyone. They are, as it were, parables of the Kingdom in its moral claims-flashlight pictures of the uncompromising demand which the Kingdom must make upon any who would respond to it. This insistence upon the parabolic character of the ethical sayings of Jesus should deliver us from the danger of taking them either as literal injunctions for any situation or as universal principles for every situation. The sermon on the Mount is relevant not because it provides us with an infallible guide to the moral life, but because as Martin Dibelius put it, 'we are able to be transformed by it'. What the supranaturalist ethic does is to subordinate the actual individual relationship to some universal, whether metaphysical or moral, external to it. The decision is not reached, the judgment is not made, on the empirical realities of the particular concrete relationship between the persons concerned. Man is made for the sabbath, and not the sabbath for man. Be the individual circumstances what they will, the moral law is the same-for all men and for all times. It is imposed on the relationship from without, from above: the function of casuistry is to 'apply' it to the case in question. It stands for 'absolute', 'objective' moral values and presents a dyke against the floods of relativism and subjectivism. And yet this heteronomy is also its profound weakness. Except to the man who believes in 'the God out there' it has no compelling sanction or self-authenticating foundation. It cannot answer the question 'Why is this wrong?' in terms of the intrinsic realities of the situation itself.
The revolt in the field of ethics from supranaturalism to naturalism, from heteronomy to autonomy, has been with us so long that we need not spend much time on it. It began with the magnificent grandeur of Kant's autonomous ideal, perhaps the greatest and most objective of all ethical systems. But this is really only secularized deism-and not completely secularized at that; for though Kant dispensed with the hypothesis of God to account for the source of the moral law, he brought him back, as a very crude deus ex machina, to ensure the eventual coincidence of virtue and happiness. Kant's moral idealism was living on religious capital. As this ran out or was rejected, it came to be replaced by every kind of ethical relativism-utilitarianism, evolutionary naturalism, existentialism. These systems, so different in themselves, have this in common: they have taken their stand, quite correctly, against any subordination of the concrete needs of the individual situation to an alien universal norm. But in the process any objective or unconditional standard has disappeared in a morass of relativism and subjectivism. Tillich sums up the situation in words that refer to culture in general but apply just as much to its ethical aspect:
'Autonomy is able to live as long as it can draw from the religious tradition of the past, from the remnants of a lost theonomy. But more and more it loses this spiritual foundation. It becomes emptier, more formalistic, or more factual and is driven towards skepticism and cynicism, towards the loss of meaning and purpose. The history of autonomous cultures in history of a continuous waste of spiritual substance. At the end of this process autonomy turns back to the lost theonomy with impotent longing, or it looks forward to a new theonomy.'
Friday, March 8, 2013
Worldly Holiness
'What is the place of worship and prayer in an entire absence of religion?' Bonhoeffer
Communion is the assertion of 'the beyond' in the midst of life, the holy in the common. When worship becomes a realm into which to withdraw from the world 'to be with God' it is the essence of a religious perversion. Doing so relegates the realm of the non-religious (ie. most of life) to the profane. It implies that the holy place where the Christ is met, lies not, as in the parable of the Sheep and the Goats, in the ordinary relationships of life; but within the circle of 'the religious'. The purpose of worship is not to retire from the secular into the department of the religious, ie. not an escape from the world, but to open oneself to the meeting of the Christ in the common. The function of worship is to make more sensitive to these depths: to focus, sharpen and deepen our response to the world and to other people beyond the point of proximate concern. The test of worship is how far it makes us more sensitive to the 'beyond in our midst', to the Christ of the hungry, the naked, the homeless and the prisoner. Only if we are more likely to recognize him there after attending an act of worship is that worship Christian rather than a piece of religiosity in Christian dress.
Prayer is conceived in terms of turning aside from the business of 'the world' to 'be with God'. It is assumed that prayer is defined in terms of what one does in the times of disengagement. The sacramental moments of communion with God are to be expected in the periods of withdrawal. We have developed a deep inferiority complex because the experts have told us that this the way we ought to pray, and yet we find that we cannot maintain ourselves for any length of time with the required discipline or consistency - we end up saying we are not the praying type and carry within ourselves an unacknowledged sense of failure and guilt. Many of our habits and traditions come from our medieval inheritance which is not as relevant for a man come of age.
I wonder whether Christian prayer, prayer in the light of the Incarnation, is not to be defined in terms of penetration through the world to God rather than of withdrawal from the world of God. How easily one finds oneself giving pious advice to a person faced with a decision to 'go away and pray about it'. Traditional spirituality has placed a premium upon 'the interior life', regarding this as the spiritual core of man. 'The heart' in the biblical sense is not the inward life, but the whole man in relation to God. Man lives just as much from outwards to inwards as from inwards to outwards. The need for times of withdrawal is accepted naturally, but with no pretension that these times are particularly 'holy'.
I pray for people and agonize for them most when I meet them and give myself to them. It is in this incarnational relationship that deep speaks to deep and the Spirit of God is able to take up our inarticulate groans and turn them into prayer. To open oneself up to another unconditionally in love is to be with him in the presence of God, and that is the heart of intercession. To pray for another is to expose both oneself and him to the common ground of our being; it is to see one's concern for him in terms of ultimate concern, to let God into the relationship. Intercession is to be with another at that depth, whether in silence or compassion or action. It may not be specifically religious, it may not be consciously Christian; but it may be a meeting of Christ in that man, because his humanity is accepted 'without any reservation'. The Christian life, the life of 'the man for others', must, as Bonhoeffer insisted, be a 'worldly life'. Yet it must be a life of 'holy worldliness', of 'sacred secularity'.
Communion is the assertion of 'the beyond' in the midst of life, the holy in the common. When worship becomes a realm into which to withdraw from the world 'to be with God' it is the essence of a religious perversion. Doing so relegates the realm of the non-religious (ie. most of life) to the profane. It implies that the holy place where the Christ is met, lies not, as in the parable of the Sheep and the Goats, in the ordinary relationships of life; but within the circle of 'the religious'. The purpose of worship is not to retire from the secular into the department of the religious, ie. not an escape from the world, but to open oneself to the meeting of the Christ in the common. The function of worship is to make more sensitive to these depths: to focus, sharpen and deepen our response to the world and to other people beyond the point of proximate concern. The test of worship is how far it makes us more sensitive to the 'beyond in our midst', to the Christ of the hungry, the naked, the homeless and the prisoner. Only if we are more likely to recognize him there after attending an act of worship is that worship Christian rather than a piece of religiosity in Christian dress.
Prayer is conceived in terms of turning aside from the business of 'the world' to 'be with God'. It is assumed that prayer is defined in terms of what one does in the times of disengagement. The sacramental moments of communion with God are to be expected in the periods of withdrawal. We have developed a deep inferiority complex because the experts have told us that this the way we ought to pray, and yet we find that we cannot maintain ourselves for any length of time with the required discipline or consistency - we end up saying we are not the praying type and carry within ourselves an unacknowledged sense of failure and guilt. Many of our habits and traditions come from our medieval inheritance which is not as relevant for a man come of age.
I wonder whether Christian prayer, prayer in the light of the Incarnation, is not to be defined in terms of penetration through the world to God rather than of withdrawal from the world of God. How easily one finds oneself giving pious advice to a person faced with a decision to 'go away and pray about it'. Traditional spirituality has placed a premium upon 'the interior life', regarding this as the spiritual core of man. 'The heart' in the biblical sense is not the inward life, but the whole man in relation to God. Man lives just as much from outwards to inwards as from inwards to outwards. The need for times of withdrawal is accepted naturally, but with no pretension that these times are particularly 'holy'.
I pray for people and agonize for them most when I meet them and give myself to them. It is in this incarnational relationship that deep speaks to deep and the Spirit of God is able to take up our inarticulate groans and turn them into prayer. To open oneself up to another unconditionally in love is to be with him in the presence of God, and that is the heart of intercession. To pray for another is to expose both oneself and him to the common ground of our being; it is to see one's concern for him in terms of ultimate concern, to let God into the relationship. Intercession is to be with another at that depth, whether in silence or compassion or action. It may not be specifically religious, it may not be consciously Christian; but it may be a meeting of Christ in that man, because his humanity is accepted 'without any reservation'. The Christian life, the life of 'the man for others', must, as Bonhoeffer insisted, be a 'worldly life'. Yet it must be a life of 'holy worldliness', of 'sacred secularity'.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
The Man for Others (contd)
It is only on the Cross that Jesus can be the bearer of the final revelation and the embodiment of God's decisive act: it is 'Christ crucified' who is 'the power of God and the wisdom of God'. For it is in this ultimate surrender of self, in love 'to uttermost', that Jesus is so completely united in the Ground of his being that he can say, 'I and the Father are one...The Father is in me and I am in the Father'.
Faith is participation in this Being of Jesus (incarnation, cross and resurrection). Our relation to God not a religious relationship to a supreme Being, absolute in power and goodness, which is a spurious conception of transcendence, but a new life for others, through participation in the Being of God.
Jesus is 'the man for others', the one in whom Love has completely taken over, the one who is utterly open to, and united with, the Ground of his being. And this 'life for others, through participation in the Being of God', is transcendence.
In the man Christ Jesus stands revealed, exposed at the surface level of 'flesh', the depth and ground of all our being as Love.
The whole schema of a supranatural Being coming down from heaven to 'save' mankind from sin, in the way that a man might put his finger into a glass of water to rescue a struggling insect, is frankly incredible to man 'come of age', who no longer believes in such a deus ex machina.
The state of our whole life is estrangement from others and ourselves, because we are estranged from the Ground of our being, because we are estranged from the origin and aim of our life...We cannot escape, however. If that something is the Ground of our being, we are bound to it for all eternity, just as we are bound to ourselves and to all other life. We always remain in the power of that from which we are estranged.
It is this union-in-estrangement with the Ground of our being - what Paul Althaus once described as 'inescapable godlessness in inescapable relationship to God' - that we mean by hell. But equally it is the union-in-love with the Ground of our being, such as we see in Jesus Christ, that is the meaning of heaven. And it is the offer of that life, in all its divine depth, to overcome the estrangement and alienation of existence as we know it that the New Testament speaks of as the 'new creation'.
Faith is participation in this Being of Jesus (incarnation, cross and resurrection). Our relation to God not a religious relationship to a supreme Being, absolute in power and goodness, which is a spurious conception of transcendence, but a new life for others, through participation in the Being of God.
Jesus is 'the man for others', the one in whom Love has completely taken over, the one who is utterly open to, and united with, the Ground of his being. And this 'life for others, through participation in the Being of God', is transcendence.
In the man Christ Jesus stands revealed, exposed at the surface level of 'flesh', the depth and ground of all our being as Love.
The whole schema of a supranatural Being coming down from heaven to 'save' mankind from sin, in the way that a man might put his finger into a glass of water to rescue a struggling insect, is frankly incredible to man 'come of age', who no longer believes in such a deus ex machina.
The state of our whole life is estrangement from others and ourselves, because we are estranged from the Ground of our being, because we are estranged from the origin and aim of our life...We cannot escape, however. If that something is the Ground of our being, we are bound to it for all eternity, just as we are bound to ourselves and to all other life. We always remain in the power of that from which we are estranged.
It is this union-in-estrangement with the Ground of our being - what Paul Althaus once described as 'inescapable godlessness in inescapable relationship to God' - that we mean by hell. But equally it is the union-in-love with the Ground of our being, such as we see in Jesus Christ, that is the meaning of heaven. And it is the offer of that life, in all its divine depth, to overcome the estrangement and alienation of existence as we know it that the New Testament speaks of as the 'new creation'.
The Man for Others
The doctrine of the Incarnation and Divinity of Christ is on any account central to the entire Christian message and crucial therefore for any reinterpretation of it. It is also the point where resistance to reinterpretation is likely to be at its maximum and where orthodoxy has its heaviest investment in traditional categories. This is true both at the level of technical theology, where any restatement must run the gauntlet of the Chalcedonian Definition and the Athanasian Creed, and at the popular level, where one will quickly be accused of destroying the Christmas story.
Traditional Christology has worked with a frankly supranaturalist scheme. Popular religion has expressed this mythologically, professional theology metaphysically.
The orthodox 'answer' to the 'God-Man' problem, as forumulated in the Definition of Chalcedon, is within its own terms unexceptional - except that properly speaking it is not a solution but a statement of the problem. But as a correct statement, as a 'signpost against all heresies', it had - and has - an irreplaceable value. 'The Christological dogma saved the Church', says Tillich, 'but with very inadequate conceptual tools'.
Popular supranaturalistic Christology has always been dominantly docetic. That is to say, Christ only appeared to be a man or looked like a man. The commonest vision of Jesus was not as a human being at all. He was a God in human form, full of supranatural knowledge and miraculous power, very much like the Olympian gods were supposed to be when they visited the earth in disguise. The supranaturalist view of the Incarnation can never really rid itself of the idea of the prince who appears in the guise of a beggar.
Myth has its place. It is there to indicate the significance of the events, the divine depth of the history.
"And what God was, the Word was". In other words, if one looked at Jesus, one saw God - for 'he who seen me, has seen the Father'. He was the complete expression, the Word, of God. Through him, as through no one else, God spoke and God acted: when one met him one was met - and saved and judged - by God. And it was to this conviction that the Apostles bore their witness. In this man, in his life, death and resurrection they had experienced God at work; and in the language of their day they confessed, like the centurion on the cross, "Truly this man was the Son of God". Here was more than just a man: here was a window into God at work. For 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself'.
There is a paradox running through all the Gospels that Jesus makes no claims for himself in his own right and at the same time makes the most tremendous claims about what God doing through him and uniquely through him. Men's response to him is men's response to God: men's rejection of him is men's rejection of God. And the fourth Gospel merely highlights this paradox when it combines the saying that 'the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing' with the uncompromising assertion, 'No one comes to the Father, but by me'. Jesus never claims to be God, personnally: yet he always claims to bring God, completely.
Traditional Christology has worked with a frankly supranaturalist scheme. Popular religion has expressed this mythologically, professional theology metaphysically.
The orthodox 'answer' to the 'God-Man' problem, as forumulated in the Definition of Chalcedon, is within its own terms unexceptional - except that properly speaking it is not a solution but a statement of the problem. But as a correct statement, as a 'signpost against all heresies', it had - and has - an irreplaceable value. 'The Christological dogma saved the Church', says Tillich, 'but with very inadequate conceptual tools'.
Popular supranaturalistic Christology has always been dominantly docetic. That is to say, Christ only appeared to be a man or looked like a man. The commonest vision of Jesus was not as a human being at all. He was a God in human form, full of supranatural knowledge and miraculous power, very much like the Olympian gods were supposed to be when they visited the earth in disguise. The supranaturalist view of the Incarnation can never really rid itself of the idea of the prince who appears in the guise of a beggar.
Myth has its place. It is there to indicate the significance of the events, the divine depth of the history.
"And what God was, the Word was". In other words, if one looked at Jesus, one saw God - for 'he who seen me, has seen the Father'. He was the complete expression, the Word, of God. Through him, as through no one else, God spoke and God acted: when one met him one was met - and saved and judged - by God. And it was to this conviction that the Apostles bore their witness. In this man, in his life, death and resurrection they had experienced God at work; and in the language of their day they confessed, like the centurion on the cross, "Truly this man was the Son of God". Here was more than just a man: here was a window into God at work. For 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself'.
There is a paradox running through all the Gospels that Jesus makes no claims for himself in his own right and at the same time makes the most tremendous claims about what God doing through him and uniquely through him. Men's response to him is men's response to God: men's rejection of him is men's rejection of God. And the fourth Gospel merely highlights this paradox when it combines the saying that 'the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing' with the uncompromising assertion, 'No one comes to the Father, but by me'. Jesus never claims to be God, personnally: yet he always claims to bring God, completely.
Monday, March 4, 2013
The Ground of our Being
Tillich proposes replacing the images of 'height' by those of 'depth' in order to express the truth of God. When Tillich speaks of God in 'depth', he is not speaking of another Being at all. He is speaking of 'the infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being', of our ultimate concern. The word 'God' denotes the ultimate depth of all our being, the creative ground and meaning of all our existence.
'To predicate personality of God', says Feuerbach, 'is nothing else than to declare personality as the absolute essence.' Feuerbach believed that true religion consists in acknowledging the divinity of the attributes, not in transferring them to an illegitimate subject. Bultmann, in answering Barth, says, 'I am trying to substitute anthropology for theology, for I am interpreting theological affirmations as assertions about life.' This is dangerous ground, because to say as Feuerbach says, that 'theology is nothing else than anthropology' means that 'the knowledge of God is nothing else than the knowledge of man.' The question inevitably arises, if theology is translated into anthropology, why do we any longer need the category of God? Is not the result of destroying supranaturalism simply to end up with naturalism, as the atheists asserted?
Bonhoeffer insists, 'God is the "beyond" in the midst'; 'The transcendent is not infinitely remote but close at hand'. Tillich insists it is necessary to push beyond naturalism and supranaturalism. The naturalist critique of supranaturalism is valid. It has torn down an idol and Christianity must not be found clinging to it. But equally Christianity must challenge the assumption of naturalism that God is merely a redundant name for nature or for humanity. The necessity for the name 'God' lies in the fact that our being has depths which naturalism, whether evolutionary, mechanistic, dialectical or humanistic, cannot or will not recognize.
The question of God is the question whether this depth of being is a reality or an illusion, not whether a Being exists beyond the bright blue sky, or anywhere else. Belief in God is a matter of 'what you take seriously without any reservation', of what for you is ultimate reality. Tillich's great contribution to theology - the reinterpretation of transcendence in a way which preserves its reality while detaching it from the projection of supranaturalism. Tillich makes the point that though it may be difficult to avoid concepts of a super-Being in religious thought and education, 'they are at least as dangerous as they are useful'.
God as the ground, source and goal of our being cannot but be represented at one and the same time as removed from the shallow, sinful surface of our lives by infinite distance and depth, and yet as nearer to us than our own selves. This is the significance of the traditional categories of transcendence and immanence.
God, since he is Love, is encountered in his fullness only 'between man and man'. God, the unconditional, is to be found only in, with and under the conditioned relationships of this life: for he is their depth and ultimate significance. Whether one has known God is tested by one question only, 'How deeply have you loved?' - for 'He who does not love does not know God; for God is love'. This links up with what Bonhoeffer was saying about a 'non-religious' understanding of God. For this ultimate and most searching question has nothing to do with 'religion'. It rests our eternal salvation upon nothing peculiarly religious. Encounter with the Son of Man is spelt out in terms of an entirely 'secular' concern for food, water, housing, hospitals and prisons, just as Jeremiah had defined the knowledge of God in terms of doing justice for the poor and needy.
Our contention has been that God is to be met not by a 'religious' turning away from the world but in unconditional concern for 'the other' seen through to its ultimate depths, that God is 'the personal ground of all that we experience'. God is the depth of common non-religious experience.
A statement is theological not because it relates to a particular Being called God, but because it asks ultimate questions about the meaning of existence.
'To predicate personality of God', says Feuerbach, 'is nothing else than to declare personality as the absolute essence.' Feuerbach believed that true religion consists in acknowledging the divinity of the attributes, not in transferring them to an illegitimate subject. Bultmann, in answering Barth, says, 'I am trying to substitute anthropology for theology, for I am interpreting theological affirmations as assertions about life.' This is dangerous ground, because to say as Feuerbach says, that 'theology is nothing else than anthropology' means that 'the knowledge of God is nothing else than the knowledge of man.' The question inevitably arises, if theology is translated into anthropology, why do we any longer need the category of God? Is not the result of destroying supranaturalism simply to end up with naturalism, as the atheists asserted?
Bonhoeffer insists, 'God is the "beyond" in the midst'; 'The transcendent is not infinitely remote but close at hand'. Tillich insists it is necessary to push beyond naturalism and supranaturalism. The naturalist critique of supranaturalism is valid. It has torn down an idol and Christianity must not be found clinging to it. But equally Christianity must challenge the assumption of naturalism that God is merely a redundant name for nature or for humanity. The necessity for the name 'God' lies in the fact that our being has depths which naturalism, whether evolutionary, mechanistic, dialectical or humanistic, cannot or will not recognize.
The question of God is the question whether this depth of being is a reality or an illusion, not whether a Being exists beyond the bright blue sky, or anywhere else. Belief in God is a matter of 'what you take seriously without any reservation', of what for you is ultimate reality. Tillich's great contribution to theology - the reinterpretation of transcendence in a way which preserves its reality while detaching it from the projection of supranaturalism. Tillich makes the point that though it may be difficult to avoid concepts of a super-Being in religious thought and education, 'they are at least as dangerous as they are useful'.
God as the ground, source and goal of our being cannot but be represented at one and the same time as removed from the shallow, sinful surface of our lives by infinite distance and depth, and yet as nearer to us than our own selves. This is the significance of the traditional categories of transcendence and immanence.
God, since he is Love, is encountered in his fullness only 'between man and man'. God, the unconditional, is to be found only in, with and under the conditioned relationships of this life: for he is their depth and ultimate significance. Whether one has known God is tested by one question only, 'How deeply have you loved?' - for 'He who does not love does not know God; for God is love'. This links up with what Bonhoeffer was saying about a 'non-religious' understanding of God. For this ultimate and most searching question has nothing to do with 'religion'. It rests our eternal salvation upon nothing peculiarly religious. Encounter with the Son of Man is spelt out in terms of an entirely 'secular' concern for food, water, housing, hospitals and prisons, just as Jeremiah had defined the knowledge of God in terms of doing justice for the poor and needy.
Our contention has been that God is to be met not by a 'religious' turning away from the world but in unconditional concern for 'the other' seen through to its ultimate depths, that God is 'the personal ground of all that we experience'. God is the depth of common non-religious experience.
A statement is theological not because it relates to a particular Being called God, but because it asks ultimate questions about the meaning of existence.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Transcendence, aus!
'The old doctrine of transcendence is nothing more than an assertion of an outmoded view of the world.' Professor R. Gregor Smith
The trick is to preserve an understanding of God even as its prior conception is being done away with. Not an easy thing to do.
The break with traditional thinking to which I believe we are now summoned is considerably more radical than that which enable Christian theology to detach itself from a literal belief in a localized heaven. The translation from God 'up there' to the God 'out there', though of liberating psychological significance, represented, as I have said, no more than a change of direction in spatial symbolism. Both conceptions presuppose fundamentally the same relationship between 'God' on the one hand and 'the world' on the other: God is a Being existing in his own right to whom the world is related in the sort of way the earth is to the sun. Whether the sun is 'above' a flat earth or 'beyond' a round one does not fundamentally affect the picture. But suppose there is no Being out there at all? Suppose, to use our analogy, the skies are empty?
The trick is to preserve an understanding of God even as its prior conception is being done away with. Not an easy thing to do.
The break with traditional thinking to which I believe we are now summoned is considerably more radical than that which enable Christian theology to detach itself from a literal belief in a localized heaven. The translation from God 'up there' to the God 'out there', though of liberating psychological significance, represented, as I have said, no more than a change of direction in spatial symbolism. Both conceptions presuppose fundamentally the same relationship between 'God' on the one hand and 'the world' on the other: God is a Being existing in his own right to whom the world is related in the sort of way the earth is to the sun. Whether the sun is 'above' a flat earth or 'beyond' a round one does not fundamentally affect the picture. But suppose there is no Being out there at all? Suppose, to use our analogy, the skies are empty?
Friday, March 1, 2013
The End of Theism
God is, by definition, ultimate reality. And one cannot argue whether ultimate reality exists. One can only ask what ultimate reality is like - whether, for instance, in the last analysis what lies at the heart of things and governs their working is to be described in personal or impersonal categories. Thus the fundamental theological question consists not in establishing the 'existence' of God as a separate entity but in pressing through in ultimate concern to what Tillich calls 'the ground of our being.'
The traditional formulation of Christianity has been in terms of what Tillich calls 'supernaturalism'. According to this way of thinking, which is what we have all been brought up to, God is posited as the 'highest Being' - out there, above and beyond the world, existing in his own right alongside and over against his creation. It is difficult to criticize this way of thinking without appearing to threaten the entire fabric of Christianity - so interwoven is it in the warp and woof of our thinking. Those who reject Christianity do so on the basis that the existence of God as a separate entity can be dismissed as superfluous; for the world may be explained just as adequately without positing such a Being. But with 'God' bowing out of the modern mind, the God of supernaturalism, the question is how far Christianity is ultimately committed to this way of thinking.
In the last century a painful but decisive step forward was taken in the recognition that the Bible does contain myth and that this is an important form of religious truth. It was gradually acknowledged, by all except fundamentalists, that the Genesis stories of the creation and the fall were representations of the deepest truths about man and the universe in the form of myth rather than history, and were none the less valid for that. Indeed, it was essential to the defence of Christian truth to recognize and assert that these stories were not history, and not therefore in competition with the alternative accounts of anthropology or cosmology. The centre of todays debate is concerned not with the relation of particular myths to history, but with how far Christianity is committed to a mythological, or supranaturalist, picture of the universe at all. Is it necessary for the Biblical faith to be expressed in terms of this worldview, which in its way is as primitive philosophically as the Genesis stories are primitive scientifically?
Bultmann maintains that the mythological language is not describing a supranatural transaction of any kind but is an attempt to express the real depth, dimension and significance of the historical event of Jesus Christ. In this person and event there was something of ultimate, unconditional significance for human life-and that, translated into the mythological view of the world, comes out as 'God' (a Being up there) 'sending' (to 'this' world) his only begotten 'Son'. The transcendental significance of the historical event is 'objectivized' as a suprantural transaction.
Bonhoeffer then puts forward the startling paradox of a non-religious understanding of God. Like chidren outgrowing the secure religious, moral and intellectual framework of the home in which 'daddy' is always in the background, 'God' is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him.
Theism as ordinarily understood 'has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. Can God be rehabilitated, or is the whole conception of that sort of a God, 'up there', 'out there', a projection, an idol, that can and should be torn down?
If Christianity is to survive, let alone to recapture 'secular' man, there is no time to lose in detaching it from this scheme of thought, from this particular theology or logos about theos, and thinking hard about what we should put in its place.
The traditional formulation of Christianity has been in terms of what Tillich calls 'supernaturalism'. According to this way of thinking, which is what we have all been brought up to, God is posited as the 'highest Being' - out there, above and beyond the world, existing in his own right alongside and over against his creation. It is difficult to criticize this way of thinking without appearing to threaten the entire fabric of Christianity - so interwoven is it in the warp and woof of our thinking. Those who reject Christianity do so on the basis that the existence of God as a separate entity can be dismissed as superfluous; for the world may be explained just as adequately without positing such a Being. But with 'God' bowing out of the modern mind, the God of supernaturalism, the question is how far Christianity is ultimately committed to this way of thinking.
In the last century a painful but decisive step forward was taken in the recognition that the Bible does contain myth and that this is an important form of religious truth. It was gradually acknowledged, by all except fundamentalists, that the Genesis stories of the creation and the fall were representations of the deepest truths about man and the universe in the form of myth rather than history, and were none the less valid for that. Indeed, it was essential to the defence of Christian truth to recognize and assert that these stories were not history, and not therefore in competition with the alternative accounts of anthropology or cosmology. The centre of todays debate is concerned not with the relation of particular myths to history, but with how far Christianity is committed to a mythological, or supranaturalist, picture of the universe at all. Is it necessary for the Biblical faith to be expressed in terms of this worldview, which in its way is as primitive philosophically as the Genesis stories are primitive scientifically?
Bultmann maintains that the mythological language is not describing a supranatural transaction of any kind but is an attempt to express the real depth, dimension and significance of the historical event of Jesus Christ. In this person and event there was something of ultimate, unconditional significance for human life-and that, translated into the mythological view of the world, comes out as 'God' (a Being up there) 'sending' (to 'this' world) his only begotten 'Son'. The transcendental significance of the historical event is 'objectivized' as a suprantural transaction.
Bonhoeffer then puts forward the startling paradox of a non-religious understanding of God. Like chidren outgrowing the secure religious, moral and intellectual framework of the home in which 'daddy' is always in the background, 'God' is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him.
Theism as ordinarily understood 'has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. Can God be rehabilitated, or is the whole conception of that sort of a God, 'up there', 'out there', a projection, an idol, that can and should be torn down?
If Christianity is to survive, let alone to recapture 'secular' man, there is no time to lose in detaching it from this scheme of thought, from this particular theology or logos about theos, and thinking hard about what we should put in its place.
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