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.