Introduction To Christianity

by J.R. Foster

The year 1968 marked the rebellion of a new generation, which not only considered postwar reconstruction in Europe as inadequate, full of injustice, full of selfishness and greed, but also viewed the entire course of history since the triumph of Christianity as a mistake and a failure. These young people wanted to improve things at last, to bring about freedom, equality, and justice, and they were convinced that they had found the way to this better world in the mainstream of Marxist thought.

Although the number of believing Christians throughout the world is not small, Christianity failed at that historical moment to make itself heard as an epoch-making alternative. Basically, the Marxist doctrine of salvation (in several differently orchestrated variations, of course) had taken a stand as the sole ethically motivated guide to the future that was at the same time consistent with a scientific world view.

We need only to recall how little was said about the horrors of the Communist gulag, how isolated Solzhenitsyn’s voice remained: No one speaks about any of that.

This is precisely what the Second Vatican Council had intended: to endow Christianity once more with the power to shape history. The nineteenth century had seen the formulation of the opinion that religion belonged to the subjective, private realm and should have its place there. But precisely because it was to be categorized as something subjective, it could not be a determining factor in the overall course of history and in the epochal decisions that had to be made as part of it.

From this perspective, speaking about God belongs neither to the realm of the practical nor to that of reality. If it was to be indulged in at all, it would have to be postponed until the most important work had been done. What remained was the figure of Jesus, who of course appeared now, no longer as the Christ, but rather as the embodiment of all the suffering and oppressed and as their spokesman, who calls us to rise up, to change society.

More noteworthy is the fact that, even in the “capitalist” countries, liberation theology was the darling of public opinion; to contradict it was viewed positively as a sin against humanity and mankind, even though no one, naturally, wanted to see the practical measures applied in his own situation, because he, of course, had already arrived at a just social order.

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).

When human embryos are artificially “cultivated” so as to have “research material” and to obtain a supply of organs, which then are supposed to benefit other human beings, there is scarcely an outcry, because so few are horrified any more. Progress demands all this, and they really are noble goals: improving the quality of life—at least for those who can afford to have recourse to such services. But if man, in his origin and at his very roots, is only an object to himself, if he is “produced” and comes off the production line with selected features and accessories, what on earth is man then supposed to think of man?

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. Everywhere there is talk about visions and messages from the other world, and wherever there is a report of an apparition, thousands travel there, in order to discover, perhaps, a crack in the world through which heaven might look down on them and send them consolation.

Instead of being the man who is God, Christ becomes the one who has experienced God in a special way. He is an enlightened one and therein is no longer fundamentally different from other enlightened individuals, for instance, Buddha. But in such an interpretation the figure of Jesus loses its inner logic.

There is a fear of Christian “imperialism”, a nostalgia for the beautiful multiplicity of religions and their supposedly primordial cheerfulness and freedom. Colonialism is said to be essentially bound up with historical Christianity, which was unwilling to accept the other in his otherness and tried to bring everything under its own protection. Thus, according to this view, the religions and cultures of South America were downtrodden and stamped out, and violence was done to the soul of the native peoples, who could not find themselves in the new order and were forcibly deprived of the old. Now there are milder and harsher variants of this opinion. 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.

Let us not forget, however, that those native peoples, to a notable extent, have already found their own expression of the Christian faith in popular devotions. That the suffering God and the kindly Mother in particular have become for them the central images of the faith, which have given them access to the God of the Bible, has something to say to us, too, today. But of course, much still remains to be done.

Having said this, we must still emphasize the brightness of God, too, along with the darkness. Ever since the Prologue to the Gospel of John, the concept of logos has been at the very center of our Christian faith in God. Logos signifies reason, meaning, or even “word”—a meaning, therefore, that is Word, that is relationship, that is creative. The God who is logos guarantees the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our existence, the aptitude of reason to know God [die Gottgemässheit der Vernunft] and the reasonableness of God [die Vernunftgemässheit Gottes], even though his understanding infinitely surpasses ours and to us may so often appear to be darkness.

Reason can speak about God; it must speak about God, or else it cuts itself short.

Included in this is the concept of creation. The world is not just maya, appearance, which we must ultimately leave behind. It is not merely the endless wheel of sufferings, from which we must try to escape. It is something positive. It is good, despite all the evil in it and despite all the sorrow, and it is good to live in it.

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.

Crime and Punishment is a brilliant example of this idea taken to its logical end

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.

Indeed belief is the conversion in which man discovers that he is following an illusion if he devotes himself only to the tangible. This is at the same time the fundamental reason why belief is not demonstrable: it is an about-turn; only he who turns about is receptive to it;

The basic paradox already present in belief as such is rendered even more profound by the fact that belief appears on the scene in the garb of days gone by and, indeed, seems itself to be something old-fashioned, the mode of life and existence current a long time ago. All attempts at modernization, whether intellectual, academic “demythologization”, or ecclesiastical, pragmatic aggiornamento, do not alter this fact; on the contrary, they strengthen the suspicion that a convulsive effort is being made to proclaim as contemporary something that is, after all, really a relic of days gone by.

Surely a God thus narrowed down to one point is bound to die definitively in a view of the world that remorselessly reduces man and his history to a tiny grain of dust in the cosmos, that can see itself as the center of the universe only in the naïve years of its childhood and now, grown out of childhood, ought finally to have the courage to awake from sleep, rub its eyes, shake off that beautiful but foolish dream, and take its place unquestioningly in the huge context in which our tiny lives have their proper function, lives that should find new meaning precisely by accepting their diminutiveness?

We have limited ourselves to our own perspective, to the visible in the widest sense, to what can be seized in our measuring grasp.

For the ancient world and the Middle Ages, being itself is true, in other words, apprehensible, because God, pure intellect, made it, and he made it by thinking it. To the creative original spirit, the Creator Spiritus, thinking and making are one and the same thing. His thinking is a creative process. Things are, because they are thought. In the ancient and medieval view, all being is, therefore, what has been thought, the thought of the absolute spirit. Conversely, this means that since all being is thought, all being is meaningful, logos, truth.9 It follows from this traditional view that human thinking is the rethinking of being itself, rethinking of the thought that is being itself. Man can rethink the logos, the meaning of being, because his own logos, his own reason, is logos of the one logos, thought of the original thought, of the creative spirit that permeates and governs his being.

The verifiability for which the historian strives, and which appeared at first in the nineteenth century to be the great triumph of history as opposed to speculation, always retains something disputable about it, an element of reconstruction, of interpretation and ambiguity, so that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, history reached a crisis and the historical approach with its proud claim to knowledge became open to question. It grew clearer and clearer that there is no such thing as the pure fact and its unshakable certainty, that even the fact is subject to interpretation and the ambiguity this implies. It became less and less possible for people not to admit to themselves that once again they did not hold in their hands the certainty they had at first promised themselves when they turned away from speculation to investigation of the facts.

So the conviction was bound to spread more and more that in the final analysis all that man could really know was what was repeatable, what he could put before his eyes at any time in an experiment.

Thus the scientific method, which consists of a combination of mathematics (Descartes!) and devotion to the facts in the form of the repeatable experiment, appears to be the one real vehicle of reliable certainty.

If before, perhaps through the conclusions implicit in the doctrine of the origin of species, he might have resignedly noted that so far as his past was concerned he was just earth, a mere chance development, if he was disillusioned by such knowledge and felt degraded, he does not need to be disturbed by this any longer, for now, wherever he comes from, he can look his future in the eye with the determination to make himself into whatever he wishes; he does not need to regard it as impossible to make himself into the God who now stands at the end as faciendum, as something makable, not at the beginning, as logos, meaning. This is already working itself out concretely today in the form of the anthropological approach. What already seems more important than the theory of evolution, which for practical purposes already lies behind us as something self-evident, is cybernetics, the “planability” of the newly to be created man, so that theologically, too, the manipulation of man by his own planning is beginning to represent a more important problem than the question of man’s past—although the two questions cannot be separated from each other and in their general tendency largely govern each other reciprocally: the reduction of man to a “fact” is the precondition for understanding him as a faciendum, which is to be led out of its own resources into a new future.

Brilliant

The most impressive attempt so far to incorporate the attitude of “belief” into the attitude of practical knowledge is to be found in Marxism. For here the faciendum, the future that we ourselves are to create, simultaneously represents the purpose or meaning of man, so that the bestowal of meaning, which in itself is accomplished or assumed in belief, seems to be transposed onto the plane of what can be made.

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. For in fact man does not live on the bread of practicability alone; he lives as man and, precisely in the intrinsically human part of his being, on the word, on love, on meaning.

But meaning is not derived from knowledge. To try to manufacture it in this way, that is, out of the provable knowledge of what can be made, would resemble Baron Munchhausen’s absurd attempt to pull himself up out of the bog by his own hair. I believe that the absurdity of this story mirrors very accurately the basic situation of man. No one can pull himself up out of the bog of uncertainty, of not being able to live, by his own exertions;

I am convinced that at bottom it was no mere accident that the Christian message, in the period when it was taking shape, first entered the Greek world and there merged with the inquiry into understanding, into truth.16 Believing and understanding belong together no less than believing and “standing”, simply because standing and understanding are inseparable.

Such an inquiry would also have to consider how it is that the theme of God has left its stamp on the whole history of humanity and right up to the present can raise such passionate argument—yes, right up to this very moment when the cry that God is dead resounds on every side and when nevertheless, in fact for this very reason, the question of God casts its shadow overpoweringly over all of us.

Bonhoeffer thought, as is well known, that it was time to finish with a God whom we insert to fill the gap at the limit of our own powers, whom we call up when we ourselves are at the end of our tether. We ought to find God, he thought, not, so to speak, in our moments of need and failure, but amid the fullness of earthly life; only in this way could it be shown that God is not an escape, constructed by necessity, which becomes more and more superfluous as the limits of our powers expand.3 In the story of man’s striving for God, both ways exist, and both seem to me equally legitimate. Both the poverty of human existence and its fullness point to God.

For whoever assented to this creed renounced at the same time the laws of the world to which he belonged; he renounced the worship of the ruling political power, on which the late Roman Empire rested, he renounced the worship of pleasure and the cult of fear and superstition that ruled the world.

Those events showed that faith is not a matter of playing with ideas but a very serious business: it says no, and must say no, to the absoluteness of political power and to the worship of the might of the mighty in general—“He has put down the mighty from their thrones” (Lk 1:52); and in doing so it has shattered the political principle’s claim to totality once and for all. In this sense the profession “There is only one God” is, precisely because it has itself no political aims, a program of decisive political importance: through the absoluteness that it lends the individual from his God, and through the relativization to which it relegates all political communities in comparison with the unity of the God who embraces them all, it forms the only definitive protection against the power of the collective and at the same time implies the complete abolition of any idea of exclusiveness in humanity as a whole.

We are also coming to understand more and more clearly that the apparent liberation of love and its conversion into a matter of impulse mean the delivery of man to the autonomous powers of sex and Eros, to whose merciless slavery he falls victim just when he is under the illusion that he has freed himself. When he eludes God, the gods put out their hands to grasp him; he can only be liberated by allowing himself to be liberated and by ceasing to try to rely on himself.

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.

The God of the philosophers, however, who was left over, was not regarded by the ancient world as having any religious significance but as an academic extrareligious reality. To leave only him standing and to profess faith in him alone and in nothing else seemed like lack of religion, as a denial of religion, as atheism. The suspicion of atheism with which early Christianity had to contend makes its intellectual orientation, its decision against religio and custom devoid of truth, its option in favor of the truth of Being clearly apparent.

this God who had been understood as pure Being or pure thought, circling around forever closed in upon itself without reaching over to man and his little world; this God of the philosophers, whose pure eternity and unchangeability had excluded any relation with the changeable and transitory, now appeared to the eye of faith as the God of men, who is not only thought of all thoughts, the eternal mathematics of the universe, but also agape, the power of creative love.

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.

By calling God simultaneously “Father” and “Almighty”, the Creed has joined together a family concept and the concept of cosmic power in the description of the one God. It thereby expresses accurately the whole point of the Christian image of God: the tension between absolute power and absolute love, absolute distance and absolute proximity, between absolute Being and a direct affinity with the most human side of humanity, the interplay of maximum and minimum of which we spoke just now.

To put it more precisely, in the old Pythagorean saying about the God who practices geometry there is expressed that insight into the mathematical structure of being which learns to understand being as having been thought, as intellectually structured; there is also expressed the perception that even matter is not simply non-sense that eludes understanding, that it too bears in itself truth and comprehensibility that make intellectual comprehension possible. In our time, through the investigation of the mathematical construction of matter and the way it can be conceived and evaluated in mathematical terms, this insight has gained an amazing solidity. Einstein said once that in the laws of nature “an intelligence so superior is revealed that in comparison all the significance of human thinking and human arrangements is a completely worthless reflection.”

The mathematical understanding of the world has here discovered, through the mathematics of the universe, so to speak, the “God of the philosophers”—with all its problems, as is shown when Einstein over and over again rejects the concept of a personal God as “anthropomorphic”, ascribing it to the “religion of fear” and the “religion of morality”, with which he contrasts, as the only appropriate attitude, the “cosmic religiosity” that to him expresses itself in “enraptured wonder at the harmony of the laws of nature”, in a “deep faith in the rationality of the structure of the world”, and in the “longing for understanding, if only of a pale reflection of the intelligence revealed in this world”.

I should like to cite another similar statement by a scientist. James Jeans once said: “We discover that the universe shows traces of a planning and controlling power that has something in common with our own individual minds, not, so far as we have yet discovered, feeling, morality, or aesthetic capacity, but the tendency to think in a way that, for lack of a better word, we have called geometry.”3 This is the same thing all over again: the mathematician discovers the mathematics of the cosmos, the being-thought-ness of things; but no more. He discovers only the God of the philosophers.

Should not one rather ask him whether he has not himself at some time or other looked at the world in a way that is other than mathematical? Whether, for example, he has never seen an apple tree in blossom and wondered why the process of fertilization by the interplay between bees and tree is not effected otherwise than through the roundabout way of the blossom, thus including the completely superfluous wonder of beauty, which again, of course, can only be understood by cooperation, by relying on that which is already beautiful even without us?

Yet the man who seeks a view of the whole will have to say: In the world we find present, without doubt, objective mathematics; but we also find equally present in the world unparalleled and unexplained wonders of beauty, or, to be more accurate, there are events that appear to the apprehending mind of man in the form of beauty, so that he is bound to say that the mathematician responsible for these events has displayed an unparalleled degree of creative imagination.

Everything we encounter is in the last analysis stuff, matter; this is the only thing that always remains as demonstrable reality and, consequently, represents the real being of all that exists—the materialistic solution. The other possibility points in the opposite direction. It says: Whoever looks thoroughly at matter will discover that it is being-thought, objectivized thought. So it cannot be the ultimate. On the contrary, before it comes thinking, the idea; all being is ultimately being-thought and can be traced back to mind as the original reality; this is the “idealistic” solution.

On the other hand, we cannot overlook the fact that we are now touching a realm in which Christian theology must be more aware of its limits than it has often been in the past; a realm in which any false forthrightness in the attempt to gain too precise a knowledge is bound to end in disastrous foolishness;

The third basic attitude could be described as the effort to give the story of God’s dealings with man its due and to take it seriously. This means that when God appears as Son, who says “You” to the Father, it is not a play produced for man, not a masked ball on the stage of human history, but the expression of reality.

The teaching of the Church, as it comes to us in the doctrine of the triune God, means at bottom renouncing any solution and remaining content with a mystery that cannot be plumbed by man. In truth this profession of faith is the only real way to renounce the arrogance of “knowing all about it”, which makes smooth solutions with their false modesty so tempting.

This again signifies that meaning is no longer simply the creator of history; instead, history becomes the creator of meaning, and the latter becomes its creation. From this vantage point Karl Marx merely continued resolutely this line of thinking by asserting that if meaning does not precede man, then it lies in the future, which man himself must bring about by his own struggles.