New Theologian , livre ebook

Ved Mehta

THE NEW THEOLOGIAN
Contents
By the Same Author
Dedication
I: ECCE HOMO
II: THE EKKLESIA
III: PASTOR BONHOEFFER
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
Other books by Ved Mehta
FACE TO FACE
WALKING THE INDIAN STREETS
FLY AND THE FLY-BOTTLE
To the office
I
Ecce Homo
OUR IMAGE OF GOD MUST GO was the startling headline on an article by the Right Reverend John Robinson, Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich, that appeared in the London Observer for March 17, 1963. An explanation just a little less startling followed: Honest to God, by the Bishop of Woolwich, will be published on Tuesday. In this article the Bishop expresses the main theme of this controversial book: the urgent need to question the traditional image of God as a supernatural Person if Christianity is to survive. Image was an advertising word. What did it have to do with God? Honest to God was a blasphemy. What was the Bishop doing blaspheming in public? And how, exactly, had a book become controversial before it was published? My hackles were up, and the Bishop s article did little to pacify me. Few people realise that we are in the middle of one of the most exciting theological ferments of the century, it began spectacularly:
New ideas about God and religion, many of them with disturbing revolutionary implications, are breaking surface. If Christianity is to survive it must be relevant to modern secular man, not just to the dwindling number of the religious . Men can no longer credit the existence of gods or of a God as a supernatural Person, such as religion has always posited. Not infrequently, as I watch or listen to a broadcast discussion between a Christian and a humanist, I catch myself realising that most of my sympathies are on the humanist s side . The new ideas were first put on record by a German pastor in a Nazi prison in 1944: Our whole 1,900-year-old Christian preaching and theology rests upon the religious premise of man . If one day it becomes apparent that this a priori premise simply does not exist but was an historical and temporary form of human self-expression, i.e. , if we reach the stage of being radically without religion-and I think this is more or less the case already-what does that mean for Christianity ? It means that the linchpin is removed from the whole structure of our Christianity to date. [The Bishop of Woolwich s italics.]
After noting that these historic words about what the Bishop identified as religionless Christianity had been written on April 30, 1944, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the imprisoned German pastor, who was executed by the Nazis not long afterward and whose book Letters and Papers from Prison was posthumously edited and published by Pastor Eberhard Bethge, a close friend, the article went on:
When his letters were first published-a bare ten years ago-one felt at once that the Church was not ready for what Bonhoeffer was saying. Indeed, it might properly be understood only 100 years hence. But it seemed one of those trickles that must one day split rocks . Modern man has opted for a secular world: he has become increasingly non-religious. The Churches have deplored this as the great defection from God, and the more they write it off, the more this movement has seen itself as anti-Christian. But, claims Bonhoeffer boldly, the period of religion is over. Man is growing out of it: he is coming of age. By that he doesn t mean that he is getting better (a prisoner of the Gestapo had few illusions about human nature) but that for good or for ill he is putting the religious world-view behind him as childish and pre-scientific.
All this was sensational stuff, even without the authority of the episcopate. The language matched the occasion, as when the Bishop, doffing his mitre to the boys of Beyond the Fringe, observed, Only in the private world of the individual s psychological need and insecurity-in that last corner of the sardine-tin of life -is room apparently left for God. It was the episcopal word with the common touch.
Our Image of God Must Go was some of the lava of the book, I discovered upon getting it on the appointed Tuesday and reading it; Honest to God was intended to be nothing less than a volcano. To me, just as to many others at the time, the story of Bonhoeffer-or, rather, what there was of it-was not unfamiliar. A theologian of great promise, he had been robbed of life at the age of thirty-nine, before he had been able to achieve his full powers, remaining, therefore, a shadowy figure who could just be glimpsed in his many books, which, considered together, presented a man grappling with ideas, profound but disturbing and only half-born, and showed a person hedged about with contradictions, such as those to be found in Letters and Papers from Prison. In any case, that book, as the Bishop said, might be one of those trickles that split rocks a hundred years hence; Honest to God was an attempt to shatter them now. Though it was a five-shilling paperback, only a hundred and forty pages long, it immediately established itself as a popular classic. (Within a few weeks of its publication, a number of translators were at work on editions for Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands, and soon the Bishop and his publishers, the Student Christian Movement Press, of London, were collecting reviews and readers letters, to be included, along with the Bishop s second thoughts, in another book, called The Honest to God Debate, for by this time Honest to God had sold three hundred and fifty thousand copies, which were proclaimed a record for any book of serious theology in the history of the world. Now the combined world sales have almost touched a million, which will probably stand as a record in the history of the world for some time to come.)
The argument of Honest to God went something like this:
Once upon a time, men, including the writers of the New Testament, believed in a three-decker universe of Heaven, earth, and Hell-a belief that enabled them to speak and write about God as up there. When, under the first onslaught of science, this universe collapsed, the loss was easily borne by a mere shift in verbal notation. God up there was amended to God out there. This little tinkering with the spatial metaphor left the New Testament story intact and at the same time extricated Christianity from the flat-earth cosmology. Then came the Copernican onslaught-the dislodgment of the geocentric universe in favor of the heliocentric-which tended to make nonsense of God out there. But some men, quickly coming to terms with this revolution in science, were able to go on thinking about God as in some way beyond outer space, perhaps because any further tinkering with the spatial metaphor might bring about an outright denial of the existence of God. The recent spying into space with radio telescopes and rockets, however, had dealt the coup de gr ce to God out there and eliminated any other site where He might be supposed to have erected His house of many mansions. Along with Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, an emeritus professor of theology at the University of Marburg, and the late Paul Tillich, who taught theology at (among other places) Union Theological Seminary and the Divinity Schools of Harvard and the University of Chicago, were among a number of modern Protestant theologians who had long since accepted the death of this God, who had accordingly set about modernizing Christianity, and who had commended themselves to the Bishop on these counts as soon as he happened to read them.
Bultmann, for his part, acknowledged that the New Testament writers presented Christ as a divine being-for example, as incarnated through a miraculous birth, as performing signs and wonders in testimony to his celestial origins, and as supranaturally redeemed and resurrected-but he asserted that these cate gories of pre xistence and incarnation, descent and ascent, miraculous intervention and cosmic catastrophe were mythological, and, for us today, were as primitive in their philosophy as the Book of Genesis was in its science. They belonged to a completely antiquated world view, he maintained, and, even when it was current, were used not to describe a supranatural event of any kind but to give expression to the real depth and significance-the trans-historical character-of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Bultmann asserted, moreover, that Christianity was not committed to any mythological or supranaturalist picture of the world. Instead, according to him, it was today in need of a thoroughgoing program of demythologization, not because all myths and symbols ought to be spurned but because Christianity had to sever its dependence on one particular mythology of supra-naturalism. The difficulties and the consequences of the program were nowhere more evident than in its application to the doctrine of the Incarnation-the subject of many heresies and debates-which, at least in popular Christianity, had always stated that two distinct natures, that of God and that of man, were united in the person of Christ, or, in the words of Charles Wesley s hymn, Veiled in flesh the Godhead see. But here, as elsewhere, Bultmann s answer was to read the Nativity story without supposing that its validity depended on a literal interruption of the natural order by a supranatural occurrence. Indeed, in his view, naturalism-the attempt to explain Christ s doings, like everything else, by humanistic and rational presuppositions-could alone claim the allegiance of intelligent men today.
Tillich s approach to the post-Copernican problem was somewhat different, the Bishop explained. For him, God was not a projection out there, an Other, of whose reality we had to convince ourselves, but was within us, the very ground of our being, the deepest springs of our social and historical existence. As Tillich also put it, and the italics are his, The name of this infinite and inexhaustible ground of history is God . That is what