Introduction To Christianity

by J.R. Foster

If the painful history of the human and Christian striving for God proves anything, it surely proves this: that any attempt to reduce God to the scope of our own comprehension leads to the absurd. We can only speak rightly about him if we renounce the attempt to comprehend and let him be the uncomprehended.

This means that there is no such thing as pure objectivity even in physics, that even here the result of the experiment, nature’s answer, depends on the question put to it. In the answer there is always a bit of the question and a bit of the questioner himself; it reflects not only nature in itself, in its pure objectivity, but also gives back something of man, of what is characteristically ours, a bit of the human subject.

You would like to reach faith, but you do not know the way? You want to cure yourself of unbelief, and you ask for a remedy? Take a lesson from those who were earlier racked by doubts like yourself. . . . Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, by taking holy water, by having Masses said, and so on. This will bring you quite naturally to believe and will stupefy you.”

What is so much yours as yourself, and what is so little yours as yourself?14 The most individual element in us—the only thing that belongs to us in the last analysis—our own “I”, is at the same time the least individual element of all, for it is precisely our “I” that we have neither from ourselves nor for ourselves.

is only in the second section of the Creed that we come up against the real difficulty—already considered briefly in the introduction—about Christianity: the profession of faith that the man Jesus, an individual executed in Palestine round about the year 30, the Christus (anointed, chosen) of God, indeed God’s own Son, is the central and decisive point of all human history.

One is reminded of the moving conclusion of Dante’s Divine Comedy, where, looking on the mystery of God, in the midst of that “all-powerful love which, quiet and united, leads around in a circle the sun and all the stars”, the poet discovers in blissful wonder his own likeness, a human countenance.

This means that the encounter with history is affected by the same sort of problem that has arisen in the search for being and for the ground of being as a result of the methods employed by physics and of the scientific approach to the investigation of nature. 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.

The historian is denied this satisfaction; past history cannot be reenacted, and verification must be content with the demonstrable soundness of the evidence on which the historian bases his view.

The first tendency—flight from Jesus to Christ—produced Harnack’s Wesen des Christentums at the beginning of the [twentieth] century, a book that offers a form of Christianity drenched in the pride and optimism of reason, the Christianity to which liberalism had reduced the original Creed by a process of “purification”. One of the crucial sentences in this work runs thus: “Not the Son but only the Father belongs in the Gospel as Jesus preached it.”6 How simple, how liberating this seems! Where faith in the Son had divided people—Christians from non-Christians, Christians of different denominations from one another—knowledge of the Father can unite.

This is what is happening today in the “death of God” theology, which tells us that, although we no longer have God, Jesus remains to us as the symbol of trust that gives us courage to go on.7 In the midst of a world emptied of God, his humanity is to be a sort of proxy for the God who can no longer be discovered. But how uncritical here are those who before were so critical that they were only willing to accept a theology without God, just so as not to appear old-fashioned in the eyes of their progressive contemporaries!

We do not need to argue about that here; so far as our question is concerned, it is at any rate certain that we cannot undo the work of the last forty years and that the way back to a mere Jesus is irrevocably barred. The attempt to outflank historical Christianity and out of the historian’s retorts to construct a pure Jesus by whom one should then be able to live is intrinsically absurd.

Jesus himself did not proclaim himself directly as the Christ (“Messiah”). Although this statement is certainly somewhat surprising to us, it now emerges with some clarity from the frequently confusing quarrels of the historians; it cannot be eluded even if, indeed, especially if, one confronts with an appropriately critical attitude the hasty process of subtraction current in present-day research into Jesus. So Jesus did not call himself unequivocally the Messiah (Christ); the man who gave him this name was Pilate, who for his part associated himself with the accusation of the Jews by giving in to this accusation and proclaiming Jesus on the Cross, in an execution notice drawn up in all the international languages of the day, as the executed king (= Messiah, Christus) of the Jews. 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.

But it also acknowledges no less resolutely that in the radicality of his service Jesus is the most human of men, the true man, and it thus subscribes to the coincidence of theology and anthropology a correspondence in which ever since then the truly exciting part of Christ-ian faith has resided.

“You are my son, today I have begotten you.” In the crucified Christ those who believe see what the meaning of that oracle, what the meaning of being chosen is: not privilege and power for oneself, but service to others. In him it becomes clear what the meaning of the story of being chosen, what the true meaning of kingship is. It has always aimed at standing for others, at being “representation”.

The Lord before whom the universe bows is the slaughtered Lamb, the symbol of existence that is pure act, pure “for”. The cosmic liturgy, the adoring homage of the universe, centers round this Lamb (Rev 5).

The Rubicon of becoming man, of “hominization”, was first crossed by the step from animal to logos, from mere life to mind. Man came into existence out of the “clay” at the moment when a creature was no longer merely “there” but, over and above just being there and filling his needs, was aware of the whole. But this step, through which logos, understanding, mind, first came into this world, is only completed when the Logos itself, the whole creative meaning, and man merge into each other.

When great numbers of people do begin, as they have done recently, to put such questions to themselves, quite often they simultaneously slip into the habit of watering down Christianity into sweet-sounding generalities, which certainly flatter the ears of their contemporaries (cf. 2 Tim 4:3) but deny them the strong meat of the faith to which they are entitled.

Let us go a step farther: being a man means being a fellow-man in every aspect, not just in the present moment, but in such a way that every man also contains the past and future of mankind, which really does prove, the closer one looks, to be one single “Adam”.

One needs only to note that our mental life depends entirely on the medium of language and to add, then, that language was not invented today. It comes from a long way off; the whole of history has contributed to it and through it enters into us as the unavoidable premise of our present, indeed, as a constant part of it.

There really is such a thing as the reference of the universe to its creator. However much we may rebel against proofs of the existence of God and whatever objections philosophical reflection may justifiably make to individual steps in the arguments, the fact remains that the radiance of the original creative idea and of its power to build does shimmer through the world and its intelligible structure.

Heaven would have to remain an empty Utopia. And in fact it does have to remain an empty Utopia so long as it depends only on the goodwill of men. How often people say, “with a little bit of goodwill, everything in the world would be fine.” This is true; a little bit of goodwill would really suffice; but it is the tragedy of mankind that it does not possess the strength for this very thing.

Being a Christian does not mean duly making a certain obligatory contribution and perhaps, as an especially perfect person, even going a little farther than is required for the fulfillment of the obligation. On the contrary, a Christian is someone who knows that in any case he lives first and foremost as the beneficiary of a bounty and that, consequently, all righteousness can only consist in being himself a donor, like the beggar who is grateful for what he receives and generously passes part of it on to others.

The whole history of mankind was led astray, suffered a break, because of Adam’s false idea of God. He wanted to be like God. I hope that you never thought that Adam’s sin lay in this. . . . Had God not invited him to nourish this desire? Adam only deluded himself about the model. He thought God was an independent, autonomous being sufficient to himself; and in order to become like him he rebelled and showed disobedience. But when God revealed himself, when God willed to show who he was, he appeared as love, tenderness, as outpouring of himself, infinite pleasure in another. Inclination, dependence. God showed himself obedient, obedient unto death. In the belief that he was becoming like God, Adam turned completely away from him. He withdrew into loneliness, and yet God was fellowship.

Let us be blunt, even at the risk of being misunderstood: the true Christian is not the denominational party member but he who through being a Christian has become truly human; not he who slavishly observes a system of norms, thinking as he does so only of himself, but he who has become freed to simple human goodness.

So it means that we can put aside our own attempts at justification, which at bottom are only excuses and range us against each other—just as Adam’s attempt at justification was an excuse, a pushing of the guilt onto the other, indeed, in the last analysis, an attempt to accuse God himself: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree”

Plato’s image of the crucified “just man”. In the Republic the great philosopher asks what is likely to be the position of a completely just man in this world. He comes to the conclusion that a man’s righteousness is only complete and guaranteed when he takes on the appearance of unrighteousness, for only then is it clear that he does not follow the opinion of men but pursues justice only for its own sake. So according to Plato the truly just man must be misunderstood and persecuted in this world; indeed, Plato goes so far as to write: “They will say that our just man will be scourged, racked, fettered, will have his eyes burned out, and at last, after all manner of suffering, will be crucified.”6 This passage, written four hundred years before Christ, is always bound to move a Christian deeply. Serious philosophical thinking here surmises that the completely just man in this world must be the crucified just man; something is sensed of that revelation of man which comes to pass on the Cross.

The fact that when the perfectly just man appeared he was crucified, delivered up by justice to death, tells us pitilessly who man is: Thou art such, man, that thou canst not bear the just man—that he who simply loves becomes a fool, a scourged criminal, an outcast. Thou art such because, unjust thyself, thou dost always need the injustice of the next man in order to feel excused and thus canst not tolerate the just man who seems to rob thee of this excuse.

Let us take another example. If someone has to keep watch alone in a room with a dead person, he will always feel his position to be somehow or other eerie, even if he is unwilling to admit it to himself and is capable of explaining to himself rationally the groundlessness of his fear. He knows perfectly well in his own mind that the corpse can do him no harm and that his position might be more dangerous if the person concerned were still alive. What arises here is a completely different kind of fear, not fear of anything in particular, but, in being alone with death, the eerie-ness of loneliness in itself, the exposed nature of existence.

In truth—one thing is certain: there exists a night into whose solitude no voice reaches; there is a door through which we can only walk alone—the door of death. In the last analysis all the fear in the world is fear of this loneliness. From this point of view, it is possible to understand why the Old Testament has only one word for hell and death, the word sheol; it regards them as ultimately identical. Death is absolute loneliness. But the loneliness into which love can no longer advance is—hell.

The statements of Scripture about the connection between sin and death are to be understood from this angle. For it now becomes clear that man’s attempt “to be like God”, his striving for autonomy, through which he wishes to stand on his own feet alone, means his death, for he just cannot stand on his own.

Another way discloses itself when man discovers that in his children he only continues to exist in a very unreal way; he wants more of himself to remain. So he takes refuge in the idea of fame, which should make him really immortal if he lives on through all ages in the memory of others. But this second attempt of man’s to obtain immortality for himself by existing in others fails just as badly as the first: what remains is not the self but only its echo, a mere shadow.

To our generation, whose critical faculty has been awakened by Bultmann, talk of the Ascension, together with that of the descent into hell, conjures up that picture of a three-story world that we call mythical and regard as finished with once and for all.

The depths we call hell man can only give to himself. Indeed, we must put it more pointedly: Hell consists in man’s being unwilling to receive anything, in his desire to be self-sufficient.

The centuries of the Church’s history are so filled with all sorts of human failure that we can quite understand Dante’s ghastly vision of the Babylonian whore sitting in the Church’s chariot; and the dreadful words of William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris in the thirteenth century, seem perfectly comprehensible. William said that the barbarism of the Church had to make everyone who saw it go rigid with horror: “We are no longer dealing with a bride but with a monster of terrible deformity and ferocity.”

The one garment of the Lord is torn between the disputing parties, the one Church is divided up into many Churches, every one of which claims more or less insistently to be alone in the right. And so for many people today the Church has become the main obstacle to belief. They can no longer see in her anything but the human struggle for power, the petty spectacle of those who, with their claim to administer official Christianity, seem to stand most in the way of the true spirit of Christianity.

The Church is not called “holy” in the Creed because her members, collectively and individually, are holy, sinless men—this dream, which appears afresh in every century, has no place in the waking world of our text, however movingly it may express a human longing that man will never abandon until a new heaven and a new earth really grant him what this age will never give him. Even at this point we can say that the sharpest critics of the Church in our time secretly live on this dream and, when they find it disappointed, bang the door of the house shut again and denounce it as a deceit.

The goal of the Christian is not private bliss but the whole. He believes in Christ, and for that reason he believes in the future of the world, not just in his own future. He knows that this future is more than he himself can create. He knows that there is a meaning he is quite incapable of destroying. Is he therefore to sit quietly with his hands in his lap? On the contrary; because he knows there is such a thing as meaning, he can and must cheerfully and intrepidly do the work of history, even though from his little segment of it he will have the feeling that it is a labor of Sisyphus and that the stone of human destiny is rolled anew, generation after generation, up the hill only to roll down again once more and nullify all previous efforts.