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.

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'.

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.

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.

Reluctant Revolution

For the New Testament writers the idea of a God 'up there' created no embarrassment - because it had not yet become a difficulty.

Whatever we may accept with the top of our minds, most of us still retain deep down the mental image of 'an old man in the sky.'

In place of a God who is literally or physically 'up there' we have accepted, as part of our mental furniture, a God who is spiritually or metaphysically 'out there.' But the idea of a God spiritually or metaphysically 'out there' dies very much harder. Indeed, most people would be seriously disturbed by the thought that it should need to die at all. For it is their God, and they have nothing to put in its place. For it is the God of our own upbringing and conversation, the God of our fathers and of our religion, who is under attack. Every one of us lives with some mental picture of a God 'out there', a God who 'exists' above and beyond the world he made, a God 'to' whom we pray and to whom we 'go' when we die.

But the signs are there that we are reaching the point at which the whole conception of a God 'out there', which has served us so well since the collapse of the three-decker universe, is itself becoming more of a hindrance than a help. The supercession of the old scheme is a gradual one. After it had been discredited scientifically, it continued to serve theologically as an acceptable frame of reference.

To the ordinary way of thinking, to believe in God means to be convinced of the existence of such a supreme and separate Being. 'Theists' are those who believe that such a Being exists, 'atheists' those who deny that he does.

Tillich says, God, is not a projection 'out there', an Other beyond the skies, of whose existence we have to convince ourselves, but the Ground of our very being.

Bonhoeffer's answer was to say that God is deliberately calling us in the twentieth century to a form of Christianity that does not depend on the premise of religion (ie. the idea that deep down every man feels the need for God in some form), just as St Paul was calling men in the first century to a form of Christianity that did not depend on the premise of circumcision.

Bultmann makes the case that in order to express the 'trans-historical' character of the historical event of Jesus of Nazareth, the New Testament writers used "mythological" language of pre-existence, incarnation, ascent and descent, miraculous intervention, cosmic catastrophe, and so on, which according to Bultmann, make sense only on a now completely antiquated worldview. Thus, modern man, instead of stumbling on the real rock of offence (the scandal of the cross) is put off by the very things which should be translating that historical occurrence into an act of God for him, but which in fact merely make it incredible.

I am only too conscious of the forces of inertia within myself. It is for me a reluctant revolution, whose full extent I have hardly begun to comprehend. Robinson

In explaining his faith journey and how he got to this spot, Robinson talks as such:

The only way I can put it is to say that over the years a number of things have unaccountably 'rung a bell'; various uncoordinated aspects of one's reading and experience have come to 'add up'. Not only that, but there are certain things about the faith that have not 'rung a bell', certain areas of traditional Christian expression - devotional and practical - which have evidently meant a great deal to most people but which have simply left one cold.