Introduction To Christianity

by J.R. Foster

Man is, indeed, as Aristotle says, a “political being”, but he cannot be reduced to politics and economics.

Has not Christian consciousness acquiesced to a great extent—without being aware of it—in the attitude that faith in God is something subjective, which belongs in the private realm and not in the common activities of public life where, in order to be able to get along, we all have to behave now etsi Deus non daretur (as if there were no God). Was it not necessary to find a way that would be valid in case it turned out that God did not exist?

But, as Nietzsche describes it, once the news really reaches people that “God is dead” and they take it to heart, then everything changes. This is demonstrated today, on the one hand, in the way that science treats human life: man is becoming a technological object while vanishing to an ever greater degree as a human subject, and he has only himself to blame.

In the leaden loneliness of a Godforsaken world, in its interior boredom, the search for mysticism, for any sort of contact with the divine, has sprung up anew.

Associated with this relativizing is the notion of a great peace among religions, which recognize each other as different ways of reflecting the one Eternal Being and should leave up to the individual which path he will grope along to find the One who nevertheless unites them all.

He himself is the way, and there is no way that is independent of him, on which he would no longer matter.

The milder version says that we should finally grant to these lost cultures the right of domicile within the Christian faith and allow them to devise for themselves an aboriginal form of Christianity. The more radical view regards Christianity in its entirety as a sort of alienation, from which the native peoples must be liberated. The demand for an aboriginal Christianity, properly understood, should be taken as an extremely important task.

After all, God’s answer to Job explains nothing; rather, it sets boundaries to our mania for judging everything and being able to say the final word on a subject, and it reminds us of our limitations. It admonishes us to trust the mystery of God in its incomprehensibility.

If the world and man do not come from a creative intelligence, which stores within itself their measures and plots the path of human existence, then all that is left are traffic rules for human behavior, which can be discarded or maintained according to their usefulness.

First of all, the believer is always threatened with an uncertainty that in moments of temptation can suddenly and unexpectedly cast a piercing light on the fragility of the whole that usually seems so self-evident to him.

Just as the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a continual temptation, so for the unbeliever faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world. In short, there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man. Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unrejectability becomes evident.

In other words, belief signifies the decision that at the very core of human existence there is a point that cannot be nourished and supported on the visible and tangible, that encounters and comes into contact with what cannot be seen and finds that it is a necessity for its own existence.

Christian belief is not merely concerned, as one might at first suspect from all the talk of belief or faith, with the eternal, which as the “entirely Other” would remain completely outside the human world and time; on the contrary, it is much more concerned with God in history, with God as man.

Is it only the ascertained and ascertainable, or is ascertaining perhaps only one particular method of making contact with reality, one that can by no means comprehend the whole of reality and that even leads to falsification of the truth and of human existence if we assume that it is the only definitive method?

Faith is thereby defined as taking up a position, as taking a stand trustfully on the ground of the word of God.

Martin Heidegger, who speaks of the duality of calculating and reflective thought. Both modes of thought are legitimate and necessary, but for this very reason neither can be absorbed in the other. There must therefore be both: calculating thought, which is concerned with “makability”, and reflective thought, which is concerned with meaning.

What is belief really? We can now reply like this: It is a human way of taking up a stand in the totality of reality, a way that cannot be reduced to knowledge and is incommensurable with knowledge; it is the bestowal of meaning without which the totality of man would remain homeless, on which man’s calculations and actions are based, and without which in the last resort he could not calculate and act, because he can only do this in the context of a meaning that bears him up.

Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received.

We noted earlier that the word “Amen” belongs in Hebrew to the root from which the word “belief” is also derived. Thus “Amen” simply says once again in its own way what belief means: the trustful placing of myself on a ground that upholds me, not because I have made it and checked it by my own calculations but, rather, precisely because I have not made it and cannot check it.

The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself.

Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me, that I can entrust myself to it like the child who knows that everything he may be wondering about is safe in the “you” of his mother.

In accordance with this injunction, three questions are put to the person to be baptized: “Do you believe in God the Father Almighty? Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. . .? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit. . .?”2 The person being baptized replies to each of these three questions with the word “Credo”—I believe—and is then each time immersed in the water. Thus the oldest form of the confession of faith takes the shape of a tripartite dialogue, of question and answer, and is, moreover, embedded in the ceremony of baptism.

The Roman creed (and with it the Western creed in general) is more concerned with the history of salvation and with Christology. It lingers, so to speak, on the positivistic side of the Christian story; it simply accepts the fact that to save us God became man; it does not seek to penetrate beyond this story to its causes and to its connection with the totality of being. The East, on the other hand, has always sought to see the Christian faith in a cosmic and metaphysical perspective, which is mirrored in professions of faith above all by the fact that Christology and belief in creation are related to each other, and thus the uniqueness of the Christian story and the everlasting, all-embracing nature of the creation come into close association.

Something absolutely central becomes visible here, namely, that faith has to do, and must have to do, with forgiving; that it aims at leading man to recognize that he is a being that can only find himself in the reception and transmission of forgiveness, a being that needs forgiveness even in his best and purest moments.

This means that faith is located in the act of conversion, in the turn of one’s being from worship of the visible and practicable to trust in the invisible.

Over against these few, for whom the divine thus becomes undisguised certainty, stand the many whose religious gift is limited to receptivity, who are denied the direct experience of the holy yet are not so deaf to it as to be unable to appreciate an encounter with it through the medium of the man granted such an experience.

The great Platonist had come to understand that a Church is something more and something other than an external institutionalization and organization of ideas. He had understood that Christianity is not a system of knowledge but a way.

Even from a purely historical point of view one can say that Israel became a people thanks to God, that it only came to itself through the call of hope signified by the name of God.

People realized, if still quite unreflectively, that while God is indeed radically One, he cannot be forced into our categories of singular and plural; rather, he stands above them, so that in the last analysis, even though he is truly one God, he cannot be fitted with complete appropriateness into the category “one”.

In a situation in which the truth of the Christian approach seems to be disappearing, the struggle for Christianity has brought to the fore again the two very methods that ancient polytheism employed to fight—and lose—its last battle. On one side, we have the retreat from the truth of reason into a realm of mere piety, mere faith, mere revelation; a retreat that in reality bears a fatal resemblance, whether by design or accident and whether the fact is admitted or not, to the ancient religion’s retreat before the logos, to the flight from truth to beautiful custom, from nature to politics. On the other side, we have an approach I will call for short “interpreted Christianity”: the stumbling blocks in Christianity are removed by the interpretative method, and, as part of the process of thus rendering it unobjectionable, its actual content is written off as dispensable phraseology, as a periphrasis not required to say the simple things now alleged, by complicated modes of exposition, to constitute its real meaning.

Most people today still admit in some form or other that there probably is some such thing as a “supreme being”. But people find it an absurd idea that this being should concern himself with man; we have the feeling—for it happens again and again even to those who try to believe—that this sort of thing is the expression of a naïve anthropomorphism, of a primitive mode of thought comprehensible in a situation in which man still lived in a small world, in which the earth was the center of all things and God had nothing else to do but look down on it. But, we think, in an age when we know how infinitely different things are, how unimportant the earth is in the vast universe and consequently how unimportant that little speck of dust, man, is in comparison with the dimensions of the cosmos—in an age like this it seems an absurd idea that this supreme being should concern himself with man, his pitiful little world, his cares, his sins, and his non-sins. But although we may think that in this way we are speaking about God in an appropriately divine manner, in reality we are in fact thinking of him in a very petty and only too human way, as if he had to be selective so as not to miss the overview. We thereby imagine him as a consciousness like ours, which has limits, must somewhere or other call a halt, and can never embrace the whole.

God: “Non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est” (Not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to let oneself be encompassed by the smallest—that is divine).

Not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to let oneself be encompassed by the smallest—that is divine.

We have seen in our reflections on this subject that physics has renounced the discovery of being itself and confines itself to the “positive”, to what can be proved. The impressive gain in precision thus made has to be paid for by a renunciation of truth that in the end can go so far that behind the prison bars of positivism, being, truth itself, disappears, ontology becomes visibly more impossible, and even philosophy has to yield in large measure to phenomenology, to the investigation of mere appearances.

Just as in physics being retires behind appearance, so here to a large extent the only past events that are still accepted as valid are those that are presented as “historical”, that is, tested and passed by historical methods. It is quite often forgotten that the full truth of history eludes documentary verification just as much as the truth of being escapes the experimental approach. So it must be said that historical science in the narrowest sense of the term not only reveals but also conceals history. The automatic result is that it can see the man Jesus all right but can only with difficulty discover the Christ in him, which as a truth of history cannot simply be checked as right or wrong by reference to the documentary evidence.

The Creed, which we are following in this book as a representative summary of the faith, formulates its faith in Jesus in the quite simple phrase “and [I believe] in Christ Jesus”. The most striking thing about it for us is that, as in St. Paul’s preferred usage, the word Christ, which was originally not a name but a title (“Messiah”), is put first.

As a fitting conclusion one could indeed assert that, thus understood, the teaching and the deeds of the historical Jesus are not as such important but that the mere fact of his having existed is sufficient—so long as one realizes that this “fact” implies the whole reality of the person who as such is his own teaching, who as such coincides with his deeds and thereby possesses his unparalleled individuality and uniqueness. The person of Jesus is his teaching, and his teaching is he himself. Christian faith, that is, faith in Jesus as the Christ, is therefore truly “personal faith”. What this means can really be understood only from this standpoint. Such faith is not the acceptance of a system but the acceptance of this person who is his word; of the word as person and of the person as Word.

This execution notice, the death sentence of history, became with paradoxical unity the “profession of faith”, the real starting point and taproot of the Christian faith, which holds Jesus to be the Christ: as the crucified criminal, this Jesus is the Christ, the King. His crucifixion is his coronation; his kingship is his surrender of himself to men, the identification of word, mission, and existence in the yielding up of this very existence. His existence is thus his word. He is word because he is love. From the Cross faith understands in increasing measure that this Jesus did not just do and say something; that in him message and person are identical, that he is all along what he says.

The apparent reinterpretation here—in Matthew 25—of the christological profession of faith into the unconditionality of human service and mutual help is not to be regarded, after what we have said, as an escape from otherwise prevailing dogma; it is in truth the logical consequence of the hyphen between Jesus and Christ and, therefore, comes right from the heart of Christology itself. For this hyphen—let me repeat—is at the same time the hyphen between faith and love. Therefore it is also true that faith that is not love is not a really Christian faith; it only seems to be such—a fact that must redound both against any doctrinalistic misunderstanding of the Catholic concept of faith and against the secularization of love that proceeds in Luther from the notion of justification exclusively by faith.