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.