5 The Next Phase Of Modern Theology
GOD IS DEAD—OR ALMOST SO!
It should be quite clear by this time that the mysticism of the new theology does not separate it from the intellectual climate of the second half of the twentieth century. Rather, it once more relates the new theology to the surrounding secular climate and consensus, because, as we have seen, the parallel secular semantic mysticisms are found in every one of the steps in the line of despair—philosophy, art, music and the general culture.
The new theology itself has an internal problem through separating the “upstairs” and “downstairs” into such watertight compartments. It came to this position:
The tension is very strong because such a total antithesis between rationality and “religious values” destroys the unity of the individual man, and he becomes divided within himself. This gave rise to a deep-seated restlessness amongst many of the modern theologians. A new attempt was made to breach the dichotomy. This attempt took two forms: one form is to try to find a unity of the whole on the level of the lower story, the other on the level of the upper.
The first form was widely publicized as the “God is dead” theology. Its adherents chose the downstairs as a place to find a unity, and they have dispensed with God altogether, including the term God. When the real God-is-dead men say God is dead, they do not merely mean that God is being listened to very little in our modern secular world, but that he never existed. They put their emphasis on the lower story and seem to deny the validity of the upper story altogether. This leaves only the word Jesus downstairs. But we must be careful not to get caught out, for if we turn our backs for a moment these men use the word Jesus as a banner with upper-story overtones. We will represent it like this:
These men chose to call themselves “Christian atheists.” They are atheists in the classical sense of that word; and they are Christians only in the sense that they have adopted for themselves Bonhoeffer’s definition of Christ, “The man for others.” They really differ little from today’s optimistic humanists.
This is fairly straightforward; in one sense these men are no longer “having their cake and eating it too.” They lost all connotation words except the term Jesus Christ, and even this, to the extent to which they defined it, they have ruined as a connotation word. But they were not being left quiet in their atheism. The upper-story men who still want to keep the use of the connotation words fought back.
In actual fact this theology has a dead god in both the upper and lower stories:
A typical exponent of the upper-story mentality was Paul Tillich (1886-1965). When asked at Santa Barbara, shortly before he died, if he ever prayed, he said, “No, but I meditate.”
Thus in the upper story it is not only that man becomes a “shade,” but the god of the new mysticism is no more than a mist which becomes only Being or Pan-everything. If we look at the theologians operating in this upper story, we may say that they are either atheists in the classical sense, or pantheists—depending on how one looks at it. Thus their god is also dead.
This vague pantheism, which we have noted in secular thinking also, creates problems for those brought up within the Christian faith. Thus for example, Bishop Robinson, a British theologian, in his writing insisted that God is actually transcendental after all. He spoiled it, however, when he went on to say that man is transcendental too (which, fascinatingly enough, is the exact word Sir Julian Huxley used about man), for this therefore means that “transcendental” really equals “nontranscendental,” and we are back at square one.
When the theologians and the secular men use this word transcendental, I would suggest that they mean by it the things that surprise them when they examine man, things they could not expect to find on the basis of what they believe about man’s origin. Or again, it means little more than Henry Miller’s “sense of wonder.” So when they use this word without definition, it does not thereby mean that they have escaped from the charge of pantheism.
As far as God and man are concerned, modern theology then is like this:
A QUEST BY THE UPPER-STORY MEN
This position is a high price to pay for rejecting historic Christianity, the Christianity of the Scripture and the Creeds. But instead of returning to the biblical position, they are making a further attempt to solve their difficulties apart from it. The next move was an attempt by the upper-story men to put a toe back into history.
Karl Barth, who can be said to be the inaugurator of all this, felt the need to try to hold back from the logical extension of his position developed by his followers. In his last years he spoke of a historic resurrection of Christ. It is not quite as simple as that, however; for on the presuppositions of these theologians, the Bible contains historical and scientific errors. Thus dichotomy, a divided concept of truth, is necessarily central in their concept of “religious truth.”
They cannot go back to the old liberalism—there can be no going back to the old quest for the historical Jesus, for it failed. However, if they give up the division of truth (which has been their answer to the old liberalism when it failed), then they have to face again what the older liberalism faced: on the one side nihilism (God is dead, man is dead and meaning is dead); on the other side, the answer of the historic and Reformation Christian position which states that there is a personal God, that man is made in his image, that he has communicated to his creature by a propositional, verbalized revelation of content, and thus this is able to be considered by the whole man. Or to put it very briefly, the only way out of their dilemma is to move back to the methodology of antithesis. Until they do this, no amount of talk about a physical resurrection of Christ will touch the heart of the discussion.
This need to get a toe back into history by the upper-story men was ably dealt with in an article in The Listener, April 12, 1962, by Dr. John Macquarrie, then lecturer in Systematic Theology at Glasgow University, later at Union Theological Seminary, New York. We quote a relevant part of it. The article is called “History and the Christ of Faith”:
A NEW QUEST
It should not surprise anybody that some of Bultmann’s disciples, afraid of losing themselves in a world of myth and make-believe, have turned again to the question of the historical Jesus. Günther Bornkamm, for instance, says that “we must look for the history in the Kerygma” and that we should not be resigned or skeptical about the historical Jesus. Does this mean that we must reopen the interminable arguments as to whether this incident or that saying took place as recorded? It cannot mean this, for the earlier quest of the historical Jesus showed that no clear answers are to be had. The new quest is intended to be different; but unfortunately there is a good deal of confusion among those who have embarked on it as to what is intended, and Bultmann himself has been severely critical of some of them. He is content to hold that our knowledge is confined to the bare fact that there was a Jesus who was crucified, and does not extend to the manner of his life or personality.
My own view is that the Christian theologian needs to assert a minimal core of factual history if the Kerygma is to present us with a way of life that is realistic and not culled from a dream world. This minimal core is not a short list of essential incidents or sayings, but simply the assertion that at the source of the Christian religion there was an actual historical instance of the pattern of life proclaimed in the Kerygma.
Here Dr. John Macquarrie acknowledges that the theologians cannot go back to the old liberal exhaustive search for the historical Jesus, for that ended in total failure. His own solution is the assertion that Jesus lived such and such a life. In other words, just say it is so.
There are two main attempts by the upper-story theologians to get a toe back into history in order not to lose themselves and God “in a world of myth and make-believe.”
First, there is the use of the phrase “God’s saving acts in history.” This sounds very fine. But they do not mean by this that God has literally entered our space-time world at a particular point in order to begin and complete man’s salvation. They mean that God is in some way saving or redeeming all history, including the most grisly acts of sin and cruelty which have been committed by individuals or groups.
Second, they just use the word “history”—this can take several forms. Macquarrie says that we must assert that certain events are history. The events are chosen arbitrarily and, of course, are not open to real historical inquiry. Or else they use the Bible as a vehicle for continuous existential experiences. They say such experiences did happen back in Bible times, but the way they are expressed in the Bible has no necessary relationship to the way the experience occurred. The biblical accounts are just the faulty cultural expression of that day. This way of looking at history is closely related to what the new Heidegger said about the mystique of language. These new theologians, both Protestants and some in the Roman Catholic Church, attempt therefore to manipulate biblical language as a help towards present existential experience.
To these men language is always an interpretation, and therefore the words of the Bible are already an interpretation of the unknowable thing which occurred. The upper-story men are left with a flood of words.
Thus neither the lower-story men nor the upper-story men did very well in trying to ease the tension. But we can be sure the hopeless attempts will continue, for on one hand their dichotomy is uncomfortable in the extreme, and on the other hand they must keep it because this division of truth is the essence of the new theology.
TODAY’S OPPORTUNITY FOR THE NEW THEOLOGY
In spite of the confusion among the new theologians and in spite of the fact that they are not really saying anything unique among the secular mysticisms which surround us, yet there are reasons why this is a moment of opportunity for the new theology to take a privileged place in our culture, a place theology has not enjoyed for a long time. It could become a leader in tomorrow’s affairs.
For some time society has been in danger of losing all sociological form. Men are facing a society without structure, and they want to fill the void that has appeared. For a long time Reformation ideas formed the basis of north European culture, and this extended to include that of the United States and English-speaking Canada, etc. But today that has been destroyed by the relativism both inside and outside the churches. Hence historic Christianity is now a minority group. Even the memory of past cultural forms is becoming weak. Moreover, the structural form of northern Europe is not the only one which is being battered to pieces. For example, one can see that Marxist Russia is moving in the same direction though at a slower rate because of its totalitarian controls. That is why modern Russian artists are being prevented from speaking freely, for they are carrying the modern thinking into Russian life.
Society cannot function without form and motivation. As the old sociological forms have been swept away, new ones must be found or society breaks down altogether. Sir Julian Huxley stepped in at this point with his suggestion that religion has a real place in modern society. But, he contended, it must be understood that religion is always evolving and that it needs to come under the control of society.
This suggestion is not as ridiculous as it sounds, even coming from a convinced humanist, if one understands the mentality of our age. The prevailing dialectical methodology fits itself easily into religious forms. After all, Senghor has said that on the basis of dialectical thinking his country would follow Teilhard de Chardin. It is well to remember that now men think dialectically on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Teilhard de Chardin, incidentally, illustrates that “the progressive” Roman Catholic theologians are further away from historic Reformation Christianity than classical Roman Catholicism, because they are also dialectical thinkers.
The orthodox Roman Catholic would have told me that I was bound for hell because I rejected the true Church. He was dealing with a concept of absolute truth. But the new Roman Catholic who sits at my fireside says, “You are all right, Dr. Schaeffer, because you are so sincere.” In the new Roman Catholicism such a statement often means that the dialectical method has taken over.
Therefore we are not surprised to find that the new Heidegger has followers, such as Karl Rahner, among some of the leading progressive Roman Catholic thinkers; and others such as Hans Küng have been strongly influenced by neo-orthodoxy. It is important to note that the position on Scripture by the Vatican Council shifted in the same direction, and men such as Raymond Panikkar, Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.C., and Anthony de Mello, S.J., are proclaiming a synthesis between Roman Catholicism and Hinduism. Truly these men have come a long way, but it is not in the direction of biblical Christianity. Neal Ascherson, under the dateline April 29, 1967, reported in a London newspaper the conversations at Marienbad between the Paulus Society, which follows Karl Rahner, and Roger Garaudy, who was chief theoretician of the French Communist Party. He showed a streak of genius when he used the heading: “This Year in Marienbad—Where Marxist and Catholic Meet,” thus relating this dialogue to the loss of categories as it was stressed by the film The Last Year at Marienbad.
The time, therefore, does seem right for this new theology to give the needed sociological forms and motivations. Of course, society could look elsewhere amongst the secular mysticisms for a new evolving religion, but the new theology has some strong advantages.
First, the undefined connotation words that the new theology uses are deeply rooted in our Western culture. This is much easier and more powerful than using new and untraditional words.
Second, these men control many of the large denominations of Protestantism, and if the progressives in the Roman Catholic Church consolidate their position, that Church as well. The liberal Roman Catholic theologians already have great influence in the Roman Catholic Church, and they use it widely. This gives the liberal theologians the advantage of functioning within the organizational stream of the Church, and thus both its organization and linguistic continuity is at their disposal.
Third, people in our culture in general are already in process of being accustomed to accept nondefined, contentless religious words and symbols, without any rational or historical control. Such words and symbols can be filled with the content of the moment. The words Jesus and Christ are the most ready for the manipulator. The phrase Jesus Christ has become a contentless banner which can be carried in any direction for sociological purposes. In other words, because the phrase Jesus Christ has been separated from true history and the content of Scripture, it can be used to trigger religiously motivated sociological actions directly contrary to the teaching of Christ. This is already in evidence, as for example in the “new” morality being advocated by many within the church today.
So there is open to the new theology the possibility of supplying society with an endless series of religiously motivated arbitrary absolutes. It is against such manipulated semantic mysticism that we do well to prepare ourselves, our children and our spiritual children.